Diane Afoumado. Indésirables

The time is ripe for new historical interpretations of the Evian Conference of 1938. It has been four decades since Henry Feingold, Saul Friedman, and David S. Wyman published their accounts of the intergovernmental conference initiated by American president Franklin D. Roosevelt to address the Jewish refugee crisis. Diane Afoumado’s 2018 version, Indésirables: 1938; La Conférence d’Évian et les réfugiés juifs, aims to be an exhaustive study of the conference. Three other recent books stake claims to be definitive texts: Paul Bartrop’s The Evian Conference of 1938 and the Jewish Refugee Crisis (2018); Raphaël Delpard’s La conférence de la honte: Évian, juillet 1938 (2015); and Jochen Thies’s Evian 1938: Als die Welt die Juden verriet (2018). The year 1938 saw dire events. The Evian Conference took place four months after the Anschluss, two months before the Munich Agreement, and four months before Kristallnacht. Afoumado’s main argument is that the conference was not as big of a failure as it has been viewed, because participating nations were never expected to do much for German and Austrian Jewish refugees. Because Evian’s objectives were so limited, it was not a failure. This is not a very satisfying new historical interpretation, given that the author also argues that Evian in many ways backfired. Not only did the conference not alleviate the plight of Jews but it also gave Hitler the signal that the thirty-two participating nations would not stand up to him. Thus Evian possibly emboldened the Nazis toward further persecution.

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