And the World Closed Its Doors: The Story of One Family Abandoned to the Holocaust

And the World Closed Its Doors The Story of One Family Abandoned to the Holocaust By David Clay Large BASIC BOOKS; 278 PAGES; $26.00 Reviewed by Howard J. De Nike There is irony in Leopold von Ranke furnishing the template for "And the World Closed Its Doors: The Story of One Family Abandoned to the Holocaust," by David Clay Large. Ranke, the great 19th Century German historiographer, inaugurated a scientific approach to history, insisting upon contemporary, firsthand sources. Large, a history professor at Montana State University and part-time San Francisco resident, takes this dictum to heart. Ranke's exhortation prefigures the modern canons of "social history." Exploiting personal letters, family albums, diaries, census records, polling tallies, and the like, a diligent researcher will be able to piece together an accurate narrative, one ultimately more trustworthy than offered by after-the-fact, self-anointed chroniclers. Large, whose previous work includes a definitive book on Berlin (2000) and a volume (co-authored with Felix Gilbert), that in its fifth edition is reputedly the greatest selling 20th Century European history text, takes advantage of a trove of letters exposing the increasingly despairing efforts by a German Jew, Max Schohl, to extricate himself and his family from the looming debacle. In 1938, Schohl opened correspondence with Julius Hess, a cousin he had never met, in Charlestown, West Virginia. The objective was to enlist his relative's aid in emigrating to the U.S. Instead Max suffered a continuum of frustration owed to FDR's documented pre-war policy denying desperately sought asylum to the bulk of Europe's Jews. That Germany recognized Max Schohl's heroism during the First World War by bestowing various combat honors, and that Max reciprocated with unstinting patriotism adds mockery to the unrelenting Nazi drumbeat. Alternating the letters between Schohl and his American cousin with a straight-forward telling of Roosevelt's tight-fisted diplomacy, Large does the rationale of social history proud: To reveal the effects of "great forces" upon individuals and the consequent actions of those individuals. Over half a decade, the Family Schohl attempted to emigrate, first to the U.S., then England, followed by Chile and Brazil, all to equal futility. Throughout, the reader knows the outcome - death at Auschwitz for Max, survival after forced labor for his wife and two daughters. But this hardly diminishes the suspense achieved through Large's taut prose and adept use of materials. Max Schohl, a distinguished chemist, owned a successful firm on the outskirts of Frankfurt. Never eschewing his Jewish roots, Schohl became a pillar of community life in the village of Florsheim, where he was a chief employer of the townspeople. During the worst times of the 1920s economic collapse, he ran a soup-kitchen and paid his employees in hard currency in place of virtually worthless German marks, a barrel-full of which mig