YIVO Archives – Recent Accessions: “Let My People Go”

Jean Kerman via the American Jewish Historical Society has donated several pamphlets and books published in 1943-1944 calling public attention to the Holocaust and Jewish armed resistance against the Nazis, including “Let My People Go,” by Victor Gollancz (London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1943).

Victor Gollancz (1893-1967) was a British Jewish publisher and left-wing activist. His publishing company, established in 1927, published pacifist and socialist literature, as well as works of fiction by George Orwell, Franz Kafka, Daphne DuMaurier, and other well-known writers. He was among the first to speak out against Nazi antisemitism in the 1930s and, during the war, became one of England’s leading advocates for the rescue of Jews and for the admittance of larger numbers of Jewish refugees to Great Britain.

This pamphlet, a best-seller for his publishing house, was a call to action. It described Nazi atrocities and the mass murder of Jews, and readers were urged to write to their representatives in Parliament to demand that immigration regulations should be relaxed for Jewish refugees and that “the boldest possible measures of rescue adopted.”