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Dr. Rafael Medoff, a scholar of Jewish history and the founding director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, collaborated with award-winning illustrator Dean Motter to create an attractive and powerful graphic novel entitled Whistleblowers: Four Who Fought to Expose the Holocaust to America. The book tells the stories of men who took great personal risk to inform the world about the unfolding horrors of Nazi terror and genocide in the 1930s and 1940s. Medoff brings considerable expertise to this project, both as the author of more than 20 works on the Holocaust and Jewish history, as well as the lead author of the Disney Education animated series, They Spoke Out: American Voices Against the Holocaust (2010). In 2015, he and Motter had also published a stand-alone comic book that became one of Whistleblowers's chapters, "Karski's Mission to Stop the Holocaust." The development of a graphic novel connects directly to the Wyman Institute's public education mission "to bridge the gap," as its website states, "between the scholarly community and the general public, by making the historical record accessible to a broader audience through exhibits, speakers, educational curricula, and other forms of media" (http://new.wymaninstitute.org/about-the-wyman-institute/). As the director of the institute named after the author of The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust (1984), it should be noted that Medoff takes a strong interpretative stance consistent with the Wyman Institute's mission to "focus on the abandonment of Europe's Jews during the Nazi era" (http://new.wymaninstitute.org/about-the-wyman-institute/). As a matter of historiography, works by other scholars, such as Robert N. Rosen's Saving the Jews: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust (2006), or Richard Breitman and Allan Lichtman's FDR and the Jews (2013), have offered a competing interpretation that stresses the constraints Roosevelt faced, as well as the achievements of the Roosevelt Administration. While it may be unrealistic to expect a graphic novel to debate historiography, it is important to note that Medoff and Motter's graphic novel reflects Wyman's side in this historiographic debate. The book opens with a foreword by Mark Zaid, an American civil rights lawyer specializing in national security whistleblower cases and founder of the non-profit Whistleblower Aid. Zaid's foreword is direct and powerful as it describes both the long history of whistleblower protections in the United States, as well as the risks associated with whistleblowing. Zaid frames Whistleblowers as an important tool for inspiring a new generation of activists to take action to challenge injustice. Zaid concludes his foreword by noting that a comic book is the perfect medium for telling these men's stories, noting that "the heroes of these pages have no capes or superpowers, but they are heroes nonetheless" (9). The trope of comic book superheroes is one that the book's illustrator, Dean Motter, actively embraces. Motter brings his experience as a comic book illustrator to provide the book with the appearance and feel of a classic superhero comic book. The author and illustrator take that concept further by imagining legendary cartoonist Lee Falk as Whistleblower's narrator for the first story, "The Book Hitler Did Not Want You to Read." Falk created the first caped superhero, the Phantom, and so, on the first page of this book's opening story, the author and illustrator have him "speak" directly to readers: "The Phantom was the first costumed superhero, but the story I'm going to tell you is about a different kind of hero. And it really happened" (13). The book begins with the story of Alan Cranston, a man best known as a four-term United States Senator from California and a Democratic presidential candidate in 1984. Medoff and Motter detail his travels in Europe in the 1930s as a young newspaper reporter and his growing understanding of the threat posed by Adolf Hitler. When Cranston returned to the United States in 1939, he discovered that the publisher Houghton Mifflin had released a sanitized version of Hitler's Mein Kampf. In response, Cranston wrote, printed, and distributed 500,000 copies of a tabloid version of Mein Kampf that fully detailed Hitler's views. Hitler sued Cranston for copyright infringement, and though he was found guilty, the decision came only after he had distributed most of the papers. Year later as a United States senator, Cranston led the effort to persuade President George H.W. Bush to assist Ethiopian Jewish refugees in their flight to Israel. The second story details the story of the Jewish refugees aboard the St. Louis fleeing from Nazi Germany after Kristallnacht. The Jewish refugees received tourist visas to Cuba, but when they arrived, Cuban President Federico Laredo Brú refused to allow them entry. Despite efforts to find refuge for the St. Louis's passengers in the United States, the American Virgin Islands, or another Latin American nation, the ship ultimately was forced to return to Europe. The authors include excerpts from the previously unpublished diary of St. Louis passenger Arthur Weil, a vivid primary source that captured the passengers' growing fear, frustration, and uncertainty. Although the passengers found refuge in Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France, half would perish when the Nazis overran western Europe. The third story focuses on the efforts of Josiah E. Dubois to uncover and challenge the efforts of the United States State Department and Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long to cover up the plight of European Jews and to thwart efforts to rescue Jews from the Holocaust. This detailed and disturbing story is a novelization of Medoff's 2008 book, Blowing the Whistle on Genocide: Josiah E. Dubois and the Struggle for an American Response to the Holocaust. The story notes how Dubois collaborated with Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr.—the only Jewish member of Roosevelt's cabinet—to document the role of State Department staff in blocking accounts of German atrocities from reaching the United States. The damning evidence they uncovered pressured President Franklin Roosevelt to create the War Refugees Board in January 1944, with Dubois as its General Counsel. The Board helped 8000 Jews to migrate through Turkey to British Palestine and recruited Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg to assist the Jews of Nazi-occupied Hungary. Although created late in the war and under-resourced, the Board's actions may have saved the lives of 200,000 Jewish men, women, and children. Even so, the chapter ends by noting that "Dubois was deeply disappointed that he was not able to accomplish more" (86). Whistleblower's fourth and final chapter focuses on Jan Karski, a Polish diplomat who worked with the Polish underground to document the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the mass executions taking place at Auschwitz. Karski risked his life to visit both the Warsaw Ghetto and the Auschwitz death camp so that he could attest to the conditions as an eyewitness. He then traveled across Nazi-occupied Europe to Britain. Based on his accounts, in 1942, the Polish Government-in-Exile in Great Britain published the report, The Mass Execution of the Jew of German Occupied Poland. Karski then traveled to the United States, meeting with Franklin Roosevelt at the White House. The book's panels that document that meeting note that when Franklin Roosevelt was confronted with the threat to Polish Jews, "President Roosevelt changed the subject." When the cartoon Karski asked point-blank, "What message would you like me to bring back to Poland?" Roosevelt responded with platitudes about winning the war. A deflated Karski concluded, "I had failed at diplomacy" (112). Each story ends with a brief biography of the main individual featured in the chapter. These biographies are accompanied by black and white photographs reinforcing the factual basis of the comic book's stories. It would have been helpful if the authors had included additional information about the sources they used, as well as suggestions for further reading. A more robust effort to cite their sources would have further enhanced the credibility of the graphic novel by demonstrating its grounding in historical scholarship. Whistleblowers has potential as a tool for educators teaching high school students, college students, and adult audiences about the history of American responses to the Holocaust. In addition to its historical narrative, the work raises timely questions about both the historical and contemporary policies of the United States regarding international intervention, immigration, and the treatment of refugees. It also could prompt discussions about the value of individual versus collective action, the ethics of whistleblowing, and the potential and limits of individual action to effect change. Overall, Medoff and Motter have crafted a readable, accessible, and gripping graphic novel. It is impressive how effectively this short work tells these stories and captures the courage and conviction of these whistleblowers. I suspect it will leave a lasting impression on all who read the stories of these "heroes" who were ordinary people inspired to undertake extraordinary actions to challenge injustice. Steven B. Burg is Professor of History at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania where he specializes in public history, historic preservation, and the history of public policy. He holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in United States history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His current research focuses on the documentation, preservation, and interpretation of historic African American cemeteries in Pennsylvania.
Steven B. Burg (Wed,) studied this question.
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