Thoughts on reading The Great Escape

I have been reading The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World by Kati Marton.

One of the people profiled in the book is Leo Szilard, the physicist who first conceived of the idea of a nuclear chain reaction, who worked with Enrico Fermi to design and create the first nuclear reactor, and who played perhaps the key role in persuading the U.S. government to build the first atom bombs. Marton notes the early influence that the books of H.G. Wells had on his thinking, especially the concept of a new world order in which a scientifically trained, intellectual elite would lead policy. I recall that Oliver Wendell Holmes thought that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a second class intellect but a first class temperament. FDR was a very good president, who led the United States and the world out of a very dark period. While it would be great to have more smart and educated people, perhaps we need to develop more people with first class temperments?

Marton focuses on three scientists, a mathematician, two movie makers, two photographers and a writer, all of them Jews born in Hungary and educated there in the brief period of history in which Jews there were allowed equality of opportunity. All of them left Hungary in the decades between World Wars I and II, and all contributed significantly to world culture. The obvious lessons of the book include the counter-productivity of antisemitism and the fact that a well prepared good mind is the best insurance against hard times. Marton, the daughter of Hungarian refugees herself, shows great sensitivity in depicting the lives of people forced to leave their homes and move from country to country seeking a safe haven. Even these extraordinarily successful people faced great difficulties as they moved from culture to culture.

The unwritten background of the holocaust in which millions of other Jews died horribly makes the story of these few who succeeded even more striking. One wonders what the world has lost by denying so many people educational and career opportunities, not to mention happy and productive lives. It is not only antisemitic Europe that has denied people by the hundreds of millions their fair chances for productive lives,