1944: FDR and the Year that Changed History. By Jay Winik. Simon & Schuster; 512 pages; $35 and £25.

CHRONICLING someone’s life can be tedious. The author must plough through a mass of detail before getting to the real action. Jay Winik, by contrast, dives straight in with “1944”, his animated tale of how the Holocaust tragically shifted into highest gear, even as the Allies turned the tide in the second world war.

The story begins with the Tehran conference in late 1943, when the three main Allied leaders agreed to open a second front, in Europe. Mr Winik, a talented storyteller, serves up memorable glimpses of the negotiations. President Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed mixing the drinks and poking fun at Winston Churchill, while Josef Stalin chain-smoked and doodled wolves’ heads. Just over six months after the conference came D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy.

But Mr Winik’s chief focus is the Holocaust. For the Nazis’ killing machine, 1944 was a critical year. Hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews boarded trains that carried them to their deaths at Auschwitz. At the height of the terror some 24,000 Jews a day were gassed in what Mr Winik describes as the “largest single mass murder in human history”.

The author argues that Roosevelt, whose health was waning and who was concentrating on winning the war and forging the peace, should still have tried much harder to stop Hitler. The contrast he draws is with Abraham Lincoln. Whereas Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation and freed the slaves even as war raged, FDR did not make saving the Jews a priority, despite mounting reports of genocide. The obtuseness of key officials at the State Department set the tone for America’s tepid response. When Roosevelt finally set up a War Refugee Board in 1944, to resettle and save Jews and other Nazi targets where it could, it was almost too late.

This is not a heavyweight history. It skims lightly across familiar, sometimes oversimplified terrain. Only briefly mentioned are the bloody battles of the Pacific theatre or the furious effort to develop the atom bomb. Instead Mr Winik dwells, passionately and at length, on Americans’ lack of interest in bombing Auschwitz even after the genocide was clear. While he is correct that America could have saved lives, he alludes only fleetingly to latter-day analyses of how poorly an aerial campaign would have worked in an era before most precision-guided bombs. The Nazis also doubtless would have improvised had the gas chambers been struck.

Erroneously, Mr Winik credits two Slovaks, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, as being the first to escape Auschwitz, in 1944. In fact, four others had made it out before then, by taking Nazi uniforms and commandeering an SS car. The escape of Vrba and Wetzler was significant, because they wrote a lengthy report on the death apparatus at the death camp. Unfortunately, officials circulated it only slowly.

It is impossible to read this book without thinking about the current crisis—the refugees fleeing terror and despotism in the Middle East who are flooding into southern Europe. They are trying desperately to make their way to, of all places, Germany. It is the largest such crisis since the aftermath of the second world war. Europe and America should remember the past, and welcome them. Seventy-plus years ago the doors were closed, and history stands in judgment.