Tad Szulc

The Secret Alliance: The Extraordinary Story of the Rescue of the Jews Since World War II

It hints at many stories but doesn't focus on any, this is the greatest minus. A very informative account of how secret intelligence networks and the Mossad set in motion operations to rescue more than 2 million Jews from Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East after WWII.

The narrative becomes a little tedious at some points because of the many protagonists and their stories getting mixed up and not stopping to deal in full with any particular one. However, there are now and then some pearls of information, little details of a few lines that are worth the whole book. But these stories of true and anonymous heroism deserve a full book by themselves. Numbers, data, don't reach the heart. It's not the same to say "2 thousand people died yesterday" than to say "Jim Jones died yesterday".

It really makes you feel frustrated to get only a glimpse at the lives of these great men and women who dedicated themselves to saving others. Or not to know more about things for example: the Costa Rican consul in France who in 1947 traded with the lives of thousands of Jews (Displaced Persons) selling visa stamps at five dollars each, getting rich on account of the Holocaust. The story is just dropped as passing by.