Surviving the Americans tells the true story of how, after attending a liberation concert given by emaciated concentration camp survivors, two Jewish-American soldiers wrote a letter about the criminal neglect and anti-Semitism of American policy in occupied Europe. This letter turned into a crusade which saved untold numbers of lives when President Truman finally reversed US policy. An extraordinary autobiographical account by Robert L. Hillard, one of the letter-writers himself, Surviving the Americans is the first book to present the genocide by neglect suffered by Jews and other camp survivors at the hands of the Americans after the liberation, and the first as well to tell of the campaign that eventually saved many of them.
ROBERT L. HILLIARD, PhD, is a professor of Mass Communication at Emerson College in Boston. A former government official, he is the author of some twenty books, including Surviving the Americans: The Continued Struggle of the Jews After Liberation, and hundreds of newspaper and periodical articles. As a soldier in the U.S. Army, Hilliard received the Purple Heart, among other decorations. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.