The drama that unfolds before us in these two volumes opens at Evian Les Bains, France, in July 1938, at the international conference convened by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to find havens of refuge for the multitude of victims of Nazi persecution in the enlarged Third Reich. There, in the presence of representatives of 31 other nations, who each declared why they could not do anything on behalf of the refugees, Virgilio Trujillo Molina, the brother of the Dominican Republic’s dictator Rafael Leonid Trujillo, announced that the Dominican Republic would open its doors to many persecuted Jews and non-Jews. The following month, at a meeting of the Intergovernmental Committee created by the Evian Conference, Trujillo’s representative mentioned one hundred thousand as the number of refugees that his country was willing to accept. Trujillo immediately gained the applause of all the governments, first and foremost that of President Roosevelt, who had...
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May 1, 2010
