Rescue & Flight tells the story of a small group of New England Unitarians, who saved many hundreds of Jewish and other refugees from Nazi persecution. Together with local supporters they smuggled most refugees from Marseilles on clandestine routes across the Pyrenees to Lisbon, and on to North America. A few were channeled to alternative destinations such as Switzerland, the Caribbean port of Martinique, and Palestine. The refugees were among the last to escape from German-controlled Europe at a time when most other routes had been closed. Ironically, the fame of several, namely the writers Lion Feuchtwanger, Heinrich Mann, and Franz Werfel, threatened the safety of the whole operation. Not all refugees escaped. Some could not endure the torturous wait for visas or despaired during the arduous journey, such as Walter Benjamin. Several were stranded along the way and had to go into hiding. More than a few were betrayed and apprehended by French or German officials. Surprisingly little is known about the origins and extent of the Marseilles and Lisbon rescue operation. Most rescuers, among them many women, have been almost forgotten.

In Rescue & Flight, author Susan Elisabeth Subak retraces the development and work of the Unitarian rescue operation, from early 1939 in Prague to the end of the war in France and Portugal. An important motive behind the study is the fate of Subak's father, a Viennese Jew, who was one of the first to receive support from the founders of the Unitarian Service Committee and reached New York in 1939. The study is based on the files of the Unitarian Service Committee, the memoirs and personal papers of the main protagonists, and more intriguingly, files of the British MI-6; the FBI; and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA predecessor organization.

In the narrative, Subak concentrates on a small group of rescuers, especially the couples Robert and Elisabeth Anthony Dexter, Noel and Hertha Field, and Waitstill and Martha Sharp, as well as Charles Joy. A subchapter is devoted to Varian Fry, the first American who was honored at the Israeli Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous among the Nations in 1996. Fry closely cooperated with the Unitarians but represented a different organization, the Emergency Rescue Committee. Founded in 1940 by a number of well-known American writers, the committee tried to save famous artists and writers who were stranded in France. Throughout the war the Unitarians and close collaborators such as Fry often single-handedly managed local offices, negotiated with government officials, and repeatedly put their lives at risk. Several Unitarians even worked as covert operatives for the OSS. After the Allied advance into France in the early summer of 1944, the OSS ended the cooperation. Once trusted allies (or useful pawns), several leading rescuers such as Charles Joy raised the suspicion of the FBI and the notorious House Committee on Un-American Activities because of their ties with left-wing refugees and members of the Résistance. To this day Fry and Noel Field remain tainted by their alleged involvement with communism.

Rescue & Flight is a well-written but not sufficiently critical collective biography of the main rescuers. The strong focus on a few protagonists has its shortcomings. Apart from Fry, the reader learns relatively little about other rescue activities in the south of France, which overlapped with the work of the Unitarians but targeted other groups such as republican refugees from Spain. The study is frequently mired in too much detail and pays inadequate attention to the larger political framework. Subak avoids a discussion of the historiography, relying frequently on outdated works on the history of the Holocaust and World War II. The acknowledgments and the occasional remark betray Subak's commitment to historian David Wyman, a fierce critic of the Roosevelt Administration's policies toward Jewish victims of Nazi persecution.

No doubt, many more Jews and other opponents of the Nazis could have been brought to safety, especially from the unoccupied part of France, had the United States handled its immigration policy more flexibly and liberally. Recently published studies on U.S. foreign policy in Latin America confirm that the White House and State Department vastly overrated Nazi influence, putting countless obstacles in the way of Jewish and other emigrants trying to leave Europe in 1940/41. Leading civil servants in the State Department, notably Breckinridge Long, made no secret of their opposition to immigration from German-controlled parts of Europe. Did these American officials act on their own accord? Were they perhaps involved in an anti-Semitic conspiracy? Or did their actions reflect widespread anti-Semitic, antisocialist, and isolationist sentiments among the American bureaucratic and political elites? Subak presents many individual case studies of Jews, such as her paternal grandparents, who perished because they were refused a U.S. visa on spurious grounds. Describing “the American response to the Holocaust” as “a colossal failure of mainstream attitudes and institutions” (p. xxvii) is certainly adequate. But the allegation, in a reference to Wyman, of “the complicity of the U.S. government in the Holocaust” (p. 222) is unfounded and biased.