RUTHFULLY YOURS

I finished reading Michael Dobbs’s “The Unwanted: America, Auschwitz, and a Village Caught In Between” with much the same question. Mr. Dobbs affectingly braids three separate narratives into one. His primary goal is to trace the plight and fate of the Jewish families who lived in one small town in Hitler’s Germany. But the outcome of these personal stories cannot be untangled from two other historical strands: Hitler’s increasingly brutal war against the Jews; and America’s ambivalent response to the urgent pleas of those trapped inside Nazi Europe. From these threads Mr. Dobbs weaves a devastating tapestry of too many hopes wrecked and too few lives saved.

The book opens on the frigid morning of Nov. 10, 1938. Fourteen-year-old Hedy Wachenheimer—who had not known she was Jewish until a teacher informed her at the age of 6—bicycles off to school from her home in Kippenheim, in southwest Germany, and into the unfolding violence of the nation-wide, Nazi-approved anti-Jewish attacks and riots known as Kristallnacht—“the night of the broken glass.” From the 1600s until Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Jews had lived uneventfully in this small, scenic village on the edge of the Black Forest. Now a sign outside of town declared, in capital letters, “JEWS ARE UNWANTED HERE.” That attitude pervaded Hedy’s school, where teachers and schoolmates had routinely taunted her, their insults echoing the anti-Semitic smears of Nazi propaganda and the increasingly severe prohibitions against Jews participating in nearly every aspect of public and professional life.

Still, Hedy was taken aback when, upon her arrival on this particular morning, her principal began shouting, “Get out, you dirty Jew!” and then grabbed her by the elbow and shoved her out the door. Throughout Kippenheim, groups of local Nazis and squads of Hitler Youth vandalized Jewish homes, looted Jewish businesses, trashed the synagogue and seized every Jewish man for transport to the Dachau concentration camp. Hedy’s father was imprisoned there for four weeks and returned home with his head shaved, his body bruised, his health compromised and his mind set on one goal: to emigrate to the United States.

He was not alone. The anti-Jewish assaults in cities and towns throughout Germany had left no doubt of Hitler’s oft-stated intent to make Germany Judenfrei—“free of Jews.” On the Monday after Kristallnacht, 1,500 Germans, mostly Jews, lined up outside the U.S. consulate in Berlin to apply for visas. It was reported that some 160,000 Germans throughout the country sought to set off for American shores.

Mr. Dobbs soberly calculates the math of supply and demand. With the U.S. quota of visas set at 27,370 annually for Germans and Austrians combined, the majority of asylum seekers would have had to wait a minimum of three years before their applications would even be considered.

The author also makes clear that the widespread reporting in the U.S. and Britain of the savage acts of Kristallnacht had finally brought to broad public consciousness the vicious reality of the Nazis’ anti-Jewish campaign. But despite the lobbying of first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and a slew of relief and humanitarian agencies, the State Department refused to increase the visa numbers. And while President Roosevelt frequently voiced support for the idea of providing asylum to German Jewry and other refugees of Nazism, he did little beyond that. With the threat of war growing, Mr. Dobbs writes, the president knew it would be battle enough to convince his xenophobic political foes and an isolationist public to get behind a united war effort; the immigration issue, the president decided, was just too costly politically.

As if to bear out this prediction, a congressional bill proposed in 1939 to permit 20,000 children from Germany to enter the U.S. over the following two years died in committee. That same year, Hitler promised he would annihilate European Jewry. With the odds and options for leaving Hitler’s Europe diminishing, Europe’s Jews were effectively trapped between the long-term goals of American diplomacy and Hitler’s quick-step march toward genocide.

Mr. Dobbs, a book author and former Washington Post reporter currently on the staff of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, chronicles in meticulous, suspenseful detail the desperate perseverance of one Kippenheim family after another to find an escape from Nazi Europe. These stories—recovered and reconstructed through letters, memoirs, family photographs, visa documents and oral histories—make up the book’s most wrenching sections. These men, women and children hoped and waited as they repeatedly tried to flee to one locale or another—Casablanca, Cuba, Martinique, Palestine, Portugal, Spain—before those refuges, too, were closed off to them.

As for Hedy, with her family’s visa application stalled in the backlog, her parents found a place for her on the British rescue mission known as Kindertransport—“children’s transport”—that between 1938 and 1940 brought about 10,000 children to England. Hedy eventually did make it to the U.S., but her parents, after being deported together with other Kippenheim Jews, first to the French internment camp at Gurs before being sent elsewhere, had still not managed to obtain a visa in 1942, when they were piled into cattle cars and shipped out to Auschwitz. There, they were gassed. One of her mother’s final letters to Hedy read, “My dear good child, I will try in every way possible to remain in contact with you, but it will probably be a long time before we hear from each other again.”

—Ms. Cole is the author of the memoir “After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges.”