1. Vicki Caron, Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933–1942, Stanford University Press, 2002.
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2. Ibid.
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3. David H. Weinberg, A Community on Trial: The Jews of Paris in the 1930s, University of Chicago Press, 1977.
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4. Paula E. Hyman, The Jews of Modern France, University of California Press, 1998.
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5. Jacques Adler, The Jews of Paris and the Final Solution, Oxford University Press, 1989.
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6. Weinberg, A Community on Trial.
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7. Ibid.
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8. Adler, Jews of Paris.
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9. One of the weirder background noises going on as I wrote this book was the seemingly never-ending obsession of former British politician and now somewhat dimmed left-wing firebrand, Ken Livingstone, and his certainty that Hitler ‘supported Zionism’ when he came to power in 1933. According to Livingstone, because Hitler supported getting the Jews out of Europe, this meant he supported Zionism, as if Jews going to Israel of their own accord is analogous to Jews being persecuted and expelled, with all their worldly goods confiscated. Livingstone’s obvious mistake was to conflate self-determination and freedom of movement with ethnic cleansing. Livingstone finally quit the Labour Party in May 2018, two years after he developed what I would call Hitler Tourette’s and became incapable of talking about anything but Hitler’s alleged Zionism.
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10. Hyman, Jews of Modern France.
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11. Ari Yashar, ‘Shocking Figures Cite 85% Assimilation in Europe’, israelnationnews.com.
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12. In 1939, 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe. In 1945 the Nazis had shrunk this number down to 3.8 million. Today, it stands at about 2 million (Pew Research).
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13. A foreign Jewish woman studying at the Sorbonne in this period wasn’t as unusual as it might sound. In the early 1930s the Sorbonne had 14,500 students, 41 per cent of whom were women and 30 per cent of whom were foreign.
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4. Jacques
1. AP, Times of Israel, 10 February 2018.
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2. For example, in ‘Is Schindler’s List Fatally Flawed?’ (Jewish Chronicle, 27 March 2013), Nathan Abrams argues that the film ‘serves to embed a narrative of Jewish weakness and passivity, in which Jews were nearly always portrayed as undeserving victims. From this point of view, then, Schindler’s List is not about the Holocaust or the Jews at all, but a biopic of Schindler and his conversion from ambivalent antihero to righteous gentile.’ Arguing that a film that is called Schindler’s List is too much about Oskar Schindler feels like a criticism in search of a point. The Jews were undeserving victims and given that they were trapped in Poland in the 1930s and 1940s, powerless and facing unimaginable brutality, arguing that they looked too ‘weak’ or ‘passive’ for the critic’s liking, flirts weirdly close to victim blaming. As anyone who has read any books about the Krakow Ghetto knows (and the first half of Roman Polanski’s autobiography, Roman by Polanski, is not a bad place to start), the Jews were weak, because they were weakened by starvation and they were unarmed but up against the Nazis’ military power. The truth is, Schindler did save their lives, they would have been killed without him, and not only is there nothing shameful about that but it is ahistorical to argue otherwise.
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3. In 1976 an Air France flight 139 was hijacked mid-journey between Tel Aviv and Paris by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the German Revolutionary Cells, and diverted to Uganda. Michel acted as the translator and mediator between the hostages and captors. He persuaded the main hijacker, Wilfred Bose, to start releasing hostages, including Michel’s own son, Olivier, then twelve. When Michel himself was eventually released he was able to give Mossad details of the hijackers’ compound and their daily habits, all of which was invaluable to the rescue mission. Michel wrote about this in his autobiography and Saul David writes about it in more detail in his book, Operation Thunderbolt (Black Bay Books, 1982).
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4. Michel Cojot-Goldberg, Namesake, Yale University Press, 1982.
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5. Vicki Caron, Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933–1942, Stanford University Press, 2002.
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6. David Weinberg, A Community on Trial: The Jews of Paris in the 1930s, University of Chicago Press, 1977.
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7. Marlise Simons, ‘Chirac Affirms France’s Guilt in Fate of Jews’, New York Times, 17 July 1995.
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8. Albert Sarraut was Prime Minister of France for, first, one month, October–November 1933, then again for the slightly longer term of five months, from January 1936 to June 1936.
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9. Caron, Uneasy Asylum.
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10. In 1940, Sarraut would vote in favour of Marshal Pétain’s government drawing up a new constitution, thus helping to establish Vichy France.
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11. Caron, Uneasy Asylum.
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12. Weinberg, Community on Trial.
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13. yadvashem.org
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14. Combattantvolontairejuif.org.
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15. Sergeant-Major Frederick Read, A War Fought Behind the Wire: A Soldier’s Tale of Life in the British Army, 1925–1947.
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16. Robert Satloff, Among the Righteous, PublicAffairs, 2007.
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17. Jean Edward Smith, The Liberation of Paris, Simon & Schuster, 2019.
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18. Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, Stanford University Press, 1995.
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19. Ibid.
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20. Ibid.
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21. Sharon Waxman, ‘1940 Jewish Census Reopens French Sore’, Chicago Tribune, 30 December 1991.
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5. Alex
1. Marie-France Pochna, Christian Dior: The Biography, Overlook Press, 2008.
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2. Dior by Dior: The Autobiography of Christian Dior, V&A Publications, 2007.
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3. Drusilla Beyfus, ‘René Gruau: A New Look at the Influential Dior Illustrator’, Daily Telegraph, 23 October 2010.
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4. Although both Dior and Gruau worked for Alex in Paris, according to Natasha Fraser Cavassoni’s book, Monsieur Dior Once Upon a Time, they didn’t actually meet one another until all three of them fled south during the war.
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5. David H. Weinberg, A Community on Trial: The Jews of Paris in the 1930s, University of Chicago Press, 1977.
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6. Richard D. Sonn, ‘Jews, Expatriate Artists, and Political Radicalism in Interwar France’, University of Arkansas, 2009.
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7. Douglas Porch, The French Foreign Legion: A Complete History of the Legendary Fighting Force, HarperCollins, 1991.
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8. Robert Gildea, Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance, Faber & Faber, 2015.
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9. André-Paul Comor, L’Épopée de la 13ième Demi-Brigade de la Légion Étrangère 1940–1945, Nouvelle Editions Latines, 1998.
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10. Commendation signed by Charles de Gaulle, 6 April 1945.
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11. Oddmund Joakimsen, Narvik 1940: Nazi Germany’s First Setback During World War Two, Nordland Red Cross War Mu
seum.
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12. Ibid.
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13. Ibid.
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14. Gildea, Fighters in the Shadows.
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6. Sara
1. http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Hitler%20Speeches/Hitler%20Speech%201937.01.30.html
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2. Vicki Caron, Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933–1942, Stanford University Press, 2002.
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3. Because I couldn’t track down their descendants I have not used their real names.
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7. Bill
1. Annie Polland and Daniel Soyer, Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840–1920, New York University Press, 2015.
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2. Ande Manners, Poor Cousins, Fawcett, 1973.
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3. Ibid.
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4. Polland and Soyer, Emerging Metropolis.
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5. Rose Cohen, Out of the Shadow: A Russian Jewish Girlhood on the Lower East Side, Cornell University Press, 1995.
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6. Polland and Soyer. Emerging Metropolis.
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7. The Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire of 1911.
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8. New York Times, 6 January 1900.
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9. Mail and Express, 17 October 1900.
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10. Arthur Minturn Chase, ‘Children of the Street’, Outlook magazine, 27 July 1912.
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11. Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews, Columbia University Press, 1981.
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12. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race; or The Racial Basis of European History, 1916.
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13. FBI, Hate Crime Statistics, https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2016.
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14. Suman Raghunatham, ‘Trump’s Xenophobic Vision of America is Inciting Racist Violence’, Nation, 27 January 2018.
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15. Pankaj Mishra, ‘Watch This Man’, London Review of Books, 3 November 2011.
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16. Polland and Soyer, Emerging Metropolis.
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17. A term from the Jim Crow laws, which classified anyone with black ancestry as black.
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18. Jedediah Purdy, ‘Environmentalism’s Racist History’, New Yorker, 13 August 2015.
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19. Alex Ross, ‘How American Racism Influenced Hitler’, New Yorker, 30 April 2018. Ross also writes about how ‘America’s knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death [during slavery] struck Hitler as an example to be emulated.’
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20. Polland and Soyer, Emerging Metropolis.
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21. Even as late as 1957, my father’s university, Lehigh in Pennsylvania, had a strict 10 per cent Jewish student quota.
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22. Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in the Modern World, Vintage, 2005.
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23. It was thanks to certain individuals that the rot was, if not entirely reversed, then at least slowed. One especially notable individual was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who became President in 1933 and had no tolerance for old bigotries. To head up his New Deal programme, FDR installed two sons of Jewish immigrants, Louis D. Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, who themselves then helped to find other Jews who worked to implement the New Deal. Roosevelt believed that no person of talent should be overlooked, and especially not in the early 1930s, when the country was so desperately in need of help. Around 4,000 Jews worked in the US government in the 1930s, ‘an unprecedented number for any Western government’ (Sachar, History of the Jews) and for his re-election campaign in 1936 FDR got 86 per cent of the Jewish vote.
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8. Henri and Sonia
1. Jacques Adler, The Jews of Paris and the Final Solution, Oxford University Press, 1989.
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2. Ibid.
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3. Jean Guéhenno, Diary of the Dark Years 1940–1944: Collaboration, Resistance and Daily Life in Occupied Paris, Oxford University Press, 2014.
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4. Ibid.
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5. Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, Noah’s Ark: The Secret Underground, Zebra Books, 1974.
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6. Ibid.
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7. Bousquet enjoyed a heady career after the war. Initially he was, like most Vichy officials, convicted of ‘Indignité national’, and sentenced. But – also like most Vichy officials – that sentence was soon reduced as France hurriedly tried to move on as quickly as possible and pretend no Frenchmen had committed any actual crimes. Bousquet went on to make a name for himself in journalism and he became especially close to François Mitterrand. But the then President of France was forced to end that friendship when some rather inconvenient allegations about Bousquet’s past came to light. Thanks to Serge Klarsfeld’s tenacity, the myth that Bousquet was merely an innocent official in Vichy was shattered in the 1980s when evidence was produced that he personally had been in charge of deporting Jewish children to their deaths. Before Bousquet stood trial, he was shot and killed in front of his home in 1993 by Christian Didier, who proudly took credit for the murder. Didier was sentenced to ten years in prison for the killing, but his real crime was scuppering what would have been the first trial of a French citizen for crimes against humanity. Bousquet’s trial would have been an extraordinary beginning to France reckoning with its Vichy past. Serge Klarsfeld, ‘Nous n’attendons rien de ce procès’, l’Humanité, 6 November 1995.
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8. http://maitron-fusilles-40-44.univ-paris1.fr/spip.php?article166449.
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9. Fourcade, Noah’s Ark.
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10. Ibid.
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11. Shannon L. Fogg, ‘Denunciations, Community Outsiders, and Material Shortages in Vichy France’, University of Missouri Press, 2003.
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12. André Halimi writes more about this in La Délation sous l’Occupation, Editions Alain Moreau, 1983.
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13. Henry Samuel, ‘Petty Disputes Led to Nazi Denunciation in WWII France’, Daily Telegraph, 2 December 2008.
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14. Ibid.
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15. Serge Klarsfeld, Memorial to the Jews Deported from France, 1942–1944, B. Klarsfeld Foundation, 1983.
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9. Jacques
1. The Nazis never asked the French to arrest Jewish children along with their parents. That was done entirely at Vichy’s volition, partly to fill the deportation quotas imposed by the Germans, and partly to spare France what I guess could be described as the administrative burden of thousands of Jewish orphans. Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, Basic Books, 1981.
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2. Premières rafles et camps d’internement en zone occupée en 1941, www.cercleshoah.org.
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3. L’Echo de Pithiviers, 24 May 1941.
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4. Incidentally, as I was writing that paragraph about Nibelle I did what no writer should do, which is check Twitter mid-writing. As it happened, someone had sent me an anti-Semitic tweet that included a reference to the Rothschilds. (A Soros reference was chucked in, too, ensuring this version of anti-Semitism was fully up-to-date.) Anti-Semites maintain tradit
ions at least as faithfully as Orthodox Jews.
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5. Sean Hand and Steven T. Katz (eds.), Post-Holocaust France and the Jews 1945–1955, New York University Press, 2015.
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6. Yadvashem.org.
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7. CERCIL (The Study and Research Centre on the Internment Camps in the Loiret).
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8. There is an interesting contrast between France’s attitude towards its concentration camps and that of Poland. Auschwitz-Birkenau are, famously, carefully preserved, whereas Pithiviers, Drancy and Beaune-la-Rolande have long since vanished. The only concentration camp in France that was really preserved was the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp, and that’s because it was run by the Germans and was in Alsace. But whereas France has increasingly acknowledged its culpability, Poland, as I discussed in Chapter 1, is now doing the opposite. ‘It’s only since the 1990s that camps in France started being commemorated,’ Martin Winstone from the Holocaust Educational Trust told me. ‘That comes from the state on some level, but it’s also a generational shift. People begin to question their parents’ and grandparents’ historical myths.’
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9. Again, it was entirely Vichy’s idea to arrest and deport Jewish children – the Nazis never demanded this.
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10. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1942v01/d393.
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11. Jean Edward Smith, The Liberation of Paris, Simon & Schuster, 2019.
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10. Alex
1. Marie-France Pochna, Christian Dior: The Biography, The Overlook Press, New York, 2008.
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2. Gitta Sereny, The German Trauma: Experiences and Reflections 1938–1999.
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3. Anne Sebba, ‘How Haute Couture Rescued War-Torn Paris,’ Daily Telegraph, 29 June 2016.
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4. In 2011, Hugo Boss issued a formal statement expressing ‘profound regret’ for its wartime activities (Jewish Chronicle, 22 Sept 2011). Admitting regret takes a long time sometimes.
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