David Wyman's pioneering and galvanizing works continue to inspire generations of historians and scholars, activists for justice worldwide. His Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941, published in 1968, and The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945, published in 1984, were the first profoundly honest studies based on incontrovertible archival scholarship to break the silence and ask the most critical and daunting questions that continue to haunt our world: How do we face the tormented truths of race and ethnic hatreds, the plagues of humiliation, torture, genocide? Who is responsible; how do we face responsibility? Wyman had the courage to tell the truth whole, with vigor and in vivid prose, that challenged us to face the future dedicated to scholarship on behalf of the ongoing quest for justice and good. Wyman has left us with a great legacy of understanding. The Holocaust was a Jewish tragedy, but it is also a Christian and a human tragedy. It was allowed to happen; there were no plans for rescue or refuge. There was no challenge to the monstrous rolling thunder of death--when there might have been, in the silent time, before the burning time. At war's end, many believed a commitment to human rights and justice would be a road to a new day of peace and civility. Many still believe that, but we are at war. And, in war, there are no final victories. (Saul S. Friedman)
Abandonment was unique in many respects, even though it was not the first book to address the question of America's response to Nazism and the Holocaust. It brought to light a number of important episodes that had not been explored, or had not been fully explored, by the six other books that had appeared prior to the publication of Abandonment in late 1984. These episodes included, most notably, the Roosevelt administration's refusal to bomb Auschwitz and the events leading to the creation of the War Refugee Board...............
