Edward Morris

It is far easier to be morally outraged by a situation than morally engaged in confronting it. We look back at the horrors of slavery or the Holocaust and exclaim, “How could they have let this happen,” even as we effectively ignore the current waves of human miseries washing around our feet. Gil and Eleanor Kraus were no such antiseptic moralists.

In 1939, as Hitler’s persecution of the Jews reached new levels of torment, this prosperous, middle-class Jewish couple from Philadelphia took it upon themselves to select and bring back to America 50 endangered Jewish children from Vienna and to secure for them full financial support—with no government aid—until they could be reunited with their families or, failing that, adopted out. (They settled on 50 children by assessing the community resources available to them.)

Author Steven Pressman, who is married to one of the Krauses’ granddaughters and directed an HBO documentary about the couple, says they were not motivated by religion. Nor did they have any personal ties to the children they sought to save. For them, it was strictly a humanitarian effort. Gil was a lawyer, Eleanor a housewife. At the time they assumed the task, they had two children of their own, a son, 13, and a daughter, 9.

What stands out in 50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany is how calmly, methodically and persistently the Krauses went about their work. Government officials discouraged them, as did other Jewish rescue groups who feared that such a high-profile undertaking would cause an anti-Semitic backlash. Moreover, they knew they would be in personal danger when they went into Austria and Germany to persuade the Nazis to let the children leave. Still, they plowed on. Assisting them in their endeavor was their friend and family pediatrician, Bob Schless, who managed to fall in love during the perilous and frustrating mission that took months to plan and complete.

Pressman’s account, which draws on a trove of Kraus family documents and pictures, illustrates just how resistant America was to admitting Jews—even Jewish children—when Germany was still willing to expel rather than exterminate them. This resistance makes the Krauses’ achievement all the more remarkable. As Paul A. Shapiro of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes in the afterword, “the United States took in a total of only about 1,000 unaccompanied children [during this period], of whom fifty—or one of every twenty—were saved by this one couple from Philadelphia.”

Michael Rockefeller, the 23-year-old son of then New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, disappeared in 1961 while on an art-collecting trip in the Asmat region along the coast of southwest New Guinea. His boat capsized in rough waters, and, after he and a companion had waited overnight for rescue, Rockefeller decided to swim to shore, buoyed by two empty gasoline cans. He was never seen again—at least not by any witnesses who’ve been willing to come forward.

The official cause of death was drowning at sea. But even as the search for young Rockefeller was still going on, rumors began surfacing that he had been killed and eaten by Asmat natives, among whom cannibalism was still a common and sacred practice. The aim of Savage Harvest is to settle the question of Rockefeller’s fate, just as earlier books and articles have attempted.

Since Carl Hoffman opens his narrative with a jarringly graphic description of what might have been Rockefeller’s last agonizing minutes, it will come as no surprise that he is indeed convinced that the young man was cannibalized. A contributing editor of National Geographic Traveler, Hoffman forms and undergirds his thesis by visiting the same villages Rockefeller scoured for art objects, interviewing descendants and kinsmen of those rumored to have killed him and uncovering personal correspondences and official documents concerning the disappearance. He also explains how the politics of the region— waning Dutch colonialism vs. rising Indonesian nationalism—figured into the story.

Hoffman depicts Rockefeller as a young man bent on pleasing his doting father—talented, to be sure, but a bit overeager and entitled, and oblivious to the fact that the art objects he was acquiring so matter-of-factly still had deep spiritual significance to their creators. Among local tribes, the author explains, taking revenge against one’s enemies was a way of restoring balance to the universe. He speculates that Rockefeller was probably killed in response to a Dutch raid on a native village three years earlier in which the main tribal leaders were slaughtered.

Hoffman’s quest is to discover physical or eyewitness evidence that Rockefeller made it to shore and there met his end. Whether his findings achieve the level of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” readers are left to decide for themselves.

Lawrence in Arabia is so geographically far-ranging that it needs to be read with an atlas of the Middle East close by—and perhaps a bottle or two of strong drink to get one through its more harrowing passages. Although the fabled T.E. Lawrence is the focal point of the narrative, author Scott Anderson casts a much wider net, sketching in the imperial designs, battles, political machinations and tribal rivalries that convulsed Turkey, Syria, Palestine and Egypt during WWI—and including those regions that would eventually become Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon and Israel.

Besides the diminutive, scholarly and strong-willed Lawrence, Anderson constructs his history around larger-than-life figures such as the agronomist, spymaster and ardent Zionist Aaron Aaronsohn; the blue-blood oil explorer William Yale; the German master of intrigue Curt Prufer; and Djemal Pasha, the military and political leader of half the besieged Ottoman Empire.

A major theme here is the incompetence and institutional cross-purposes of the British military establishment, failings that would have been comic had they not led to such massive loss of life (most infamously at Gallipoli). It’s little wonder that Lawrence, a schemer who worked his own plans at his own pace, was so effective initially in his campaign for Arab independence. His gifts for language, cultural understanding and diplomacy enabled him to assemble and lead native troops in a series of successful campaigns. And despite his Oxford education and finely tuned English sensibilities, he could—and did—spill Turkish blood as readily as his most savage underlings. In spite of the battles he won, though, he ultimately lost his private war to keep England and France from imposing their will on the conquered territories.

Following the war, Lawrence did as much to lower his profile as he had done to raise it during the hostilities. Working in a series of low-level military jobs, writing his memoirs and withdrawing further into seclusion, Lawrence exhibited all the symptoms, Anderson notes, of PTSD. He died in a motorcycle accident in 1935 at the age of 47.