Rescue Board Book Review with Eric Saul, Founder of Visas for Life

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award, Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe tells the story of the creation of the War Refugee Board by Franklin D. Roosevelt and led by John Pehle. In the twenty months after its creation in 1944, Pehle pulled together a team of D.C. pencil pushers, international relief workers, smugglers, diplomats, millionaires, and rabble-rousers to run operations across four continents and a dozen countries. Together, they tricked the Nazis, forged identity papers, maneuvered food and medicine into concentration camps, recruited spies, leaked news stories, laundered money, negotiated ransoms, and funneled millions of dollars into Europe. They bought weapons for the French Resistance and sliced red tape to allow Jewish refugees to escape to Palestine.

Written by Holocaust historian Rebecca Erbelding, this book pieces together years of research and newly uncovered archival materials to tell the dramatic story of America’s little-known efforts to save the Jews of Europe.

Eric Saul, Founder and Executive Director, Visas for Life and Institute for the Study of Rescue and Altruism in the Holocaust (ISRAH).

Eric Saul is a historian, with an emphasis on American history. He was curator and director of the Presidio Army Museum in San Francisco, 1977-1986. While there, he curated a number of pioneering exhibits on the contribution of minority groups to the US military.

Saul has been Guest Curator at the Simon Wiesenthal Center - Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles 1994 -2001. He curated a major exhibit entitled Art in the Holocaust. In 1998, he curated an exhibit entitled I am My Brother's Keeper on Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal. He also curated Liberation: Revealing the Unspeakable, an exhibit on the liberation of the concentration camps by the allied Armies, 1944-45.

In 1993, Eric Saul founded the Visas for Life: The Righteous and Honorable Diplomats Project to document and honor Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara. In 1996, the project expanded to honor all diplomats who helped Jews during the war. Under his direction, the Visas for Life Project created six traveling exhibits on the topic of diplomatic rescue, which have been shown in more than 200 institutions worldwide.

Eric Saul has been a consultant on numerous the Holocaust documentaries entitled Diplomats for the Damned (1999), Sugihara: Conspiracy of Kindness (2000), 50 Italians: The Men who Saved 50,000 Jewish Lives. Eric Saul was an early consultant for Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. Eric Saul was the co-author of The Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906 (1982) and contributed to Go For Broke: The Story of the Japanese American Soldier in World War II (1981). He was coeditor of Yukiko Sugihara's memoir, Visas for Life (1995). He also authored Unlikely Liberators: The Story of Chiune Sugihara and Japanese Americans of the 522nd Field Artillery (1995).

Eric Saul contributed to the successful legislation and lobbying for Congressional Gold Medals to honor Japanese American soldiers of World War II (2010), Swedish diplomat rescuer Raoul Wallenberg (2012) and sixty diplomat rescuers (2024). In April 2023, he initiated legislation to honor American rescuers in the Holocaust with a Congressional Gold Medal. Among the so-sponsors are Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and Congresswoman Judy Chu. Saul is presently preparing to co-edit an encyclopedia on rescue in the Holocaust.

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