Official black Citroëns cruised the streets of Nice, and passengers attentively scrutinised passers-by. At any moment, a pedestrian would be asked to get into a car. No useless questions or identity checks. The car went to a synagogue. There the victim was undressed. If he was circumcised, he automatically took his place in the next convoy to Drancy.29
Altogether 1,800 Jews were arrested, many fewer than the 25,000 the Germans had hoped for. The victims included the father of the future historian of the Holocaust in France, Serge Klarsfeld.30
The anti-Semitic fury of the Nazis reached a peak in the first months of 1944. Darquier had been removed because he was too ineffectual. His replacement Paty de Clam was no more effective, despite his promising name, and matters were really run by his second-in-command Joseph Antignac who took over in the spring. In the eight months of 1944 before the Liberation, 14,833 Jews were deported. This was a slightly higher monthly figure than the previous year. The French police still participated in some operations involving non-French Jews, but most work was now done by the Germans with help from the Milice. The arrests were carried out in a frenzied and indiscriminate way. No Jews were safe, whether French or foreign, young or old, sick or healthy: hospitals and orphanages were combed for Jews. One notorious episode occurred in July when the Lyons Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie seized forty-four small children from a children’s refuge in Izieu near Lyons. All ended up in Auschwitz. The last convoy left Drancy on 17 August 1944, eight days before the Liberation of Paris.
A total of 75,721 Jews was deported from France if one includes those from the Nord/Pas-de-Calais, which was attached to Belgium, and those deported individually as resisters. About another 4,000 Jews died in French camps or were executed in France. This gives about 80,000 Jewish victims of the Holocaust in France—of whom about 3.5 per cent (2,500) returned alive. Approximately 24,000 (32 per cent) of those deported were French Jews and 56,500 (68 per cent) foreign. This represented approximately 12 per cent of French Jews and 41 per cent of foreign Jews in France.31 So two-thirds of the Jews deported were foreign although they had comprised only about half the Jews in France.
As has already been noted, it would be wrong to infer from these figures that Laval sacrificed almost half the foreign Jews to save French ones. Without French police co-operation, it would have been difficult for the Germans to arrest the foreign Jews. About three-quarters of all Jews were arrested by the French police. There were only about 2,500–3,000 German police in France in mid-1942. After November 1942 the German police were more thinly spread than ever: in Saint-Étienne, the Gestapo arrived in February 1943, and it only had four men and one commander for a population of 200,000. When Röthke pleaded with Berlin in June 1943 for 250 extra French-speaking Gestapo men to assist in the roundups, he was told to manage with what he had.32
If one compares Vichy’s role in the Final Solution to that of other semi-independent governments in Nazi Europe, there are few others who offered as much help as Vichy. It was Vichy which, to German surprise, had originally volunteered to deport foreign Jews from the Free Zone over which the Germans had no jurisdiction. Pétain’s Vichy was not as co-operative as Slovakia, which delivered native and foreign Jews from its own heartland, but it was more so than Horthy’s Hungary which, despite having had indigenous anti-Semitic legislation since 1920, handed over no Jews until the German occupation in March 1944. But there is a paradox: France was also one of the countries with the largest surviving Jewish population. Apart from Denmark, where only 7 per cent of Jews perished and most of the tiny Jewish population was spirited across the water to Sweden, and Italy, where the non-cooperation of the authorities meant that only 16 per cent were deported, nowhere compared more favourably than France from where ‘only’ 24 per cent of Jews were deported, as opposed to 78 per cent from Holland, 45 per cent from Belgium, and 50 per cent from Hungary. This paradox can only be explained by looking at the responses of both the Jews— who were not merely passive victims of their fate—and the non-Jewish French population.
Jewish Responses: French and Immigrants
In 1939, there were about 300,000 Jews in France, 190,000 of them French citizens and the rest foreign. Most of the foreign Jews had arrived as immigrants from Eastern Europe in the 1920s or refugees from Nazism during the 1930s. The assimilated French Jews, many of them pillars of the bourgeoisie, frequently looked down on the recent arrivals from Eastern Europe, who were mainly artisans and petits bourgeois. In Paris, where most Jews lived, the latter lived in the poorer quarters of the east and centre (the Marais and Belleville), and the former in the west.33 The numbers of foreigners had been swelled by about 20,000 in 1940 with the addition of Dutch and Belgian Jewish refugees during the Exodus, and 6,500 Jews expelled into France from the Palatinate and Baden-Württemberg.
Whether French or foreign, the reaction of most Jews in 1940 was to obey the law and hope for better times. About 90 per cent of Jews in the Occupied Zone registered under the German ordinance of 27 September 1940. Even nine months later, when Vichy introduced a census, and there was mounting evidence of the danger ahead, about 108,000 Jews registered within two months. In total, 287,962 Jews registered in the two zones. This was a fateful step since the census lists provided the authorities with the names and addresses used when carrying out arrests. Astonishingly, many French Jews who fled Paris during the Exodus returned afterwards, either because they underestimated Nazi intentions or because they refused to be intimidated.
The distinguished paediatrician Robert Debré, father of the future Gaullist prime minister Michel Debré, felt it his duty to ‘act like our Alsatian ancestors, live under the yoke and work to get rid of them’.34 The civil servant Philip Erlanger considered joining de Gaulle but decided to remain and ‘bear witness’; his friend René Blum, director of the Monte Carlo Ballet and brother of Léon, felt the same. Such people refused to deny their origins and continued to trust in France.35 Raymond-Raoul Lambert, who came of an old French Jewish family, wept when Vichy’s first Jewish Statute was announced. He wrote in his diary: ‘one does not judge one’s mother when she is unjust. One suffers and waits. Thus we Jews of France must bow our heads and suffer.’36
The response of Jewish organizations was complicated by the divisions between French and foreign Jews. For French Jews to identify with the foreign Jews involved renouncing a tradition of assimilation and French patriotism. One French Jewish inmate of the Compiègne camp wrote: ‘If I should perish in this adventure, it is for France that I will have died; I do not wish to be considered a victim of Judaism’.37 Vichy paid lip-service to the tradition of French Jewish patriotism by offering exemptions to French Jews who were judged to have rendered services to France. French Jews were initially allowed to join the Legion; the Jewish scouting movement (EIF) was one of the youth movements officially accredited by the regime, and it received government grants until 1941. Indeed some French Jewish organizations were fully in sympathy with aspects of the Vichy regime. In September 1940, the Council of French Rabbis drafted a declaration of allegiance to Pétain, and affirmed its support for the values of the National Revolution. The EIF, which was trying to set up rural communities for Jews, fully subscribed to Vichy’s ruralist rhetoric.38
Some French Jews wished to believe Darlan’s remark: ‘The stateless Jews, who for the past fifteen years have invaded our country, do not interest me. But the others, the good old French Jews, are entitled to all the protection we can give them.’39 Jacques Helbronner, President of the Central Consistory (the top administrative body of French Jewry), had known Pétain since 1917 and visited him frequently during the Occupation. In the immigrant Jewish community, he was known as ‘the Marshal’s Jew’.40 Pétain mendaciously let Helbronner believe that the Statute had been the work of extremists in his government, and that he wanted it repealed.41 In April 1941, the Consistory suggested to Vallat that immigrant Jews could be placed in work camps. Helbronner himself even proposed to Pétain a revised Jewish statute which would eliminate
from public life ‘elements which cannot be assimilated to the national spirit’.42
For French Jews, the objection to the UGIF was that it lumped Jews together, ignoring the distinction between French and non-French Jews. Most Consistory leaders, who saw themselves as the representatives of French Judaism, refused to play any role in the UGIF, but Vallat secured the co-operation of other French Jewish leaders by threatening that otherwise he would appoint outsiders of his own choosing. These French Jewish leaders offered little guidance and stuck to legality. The UGIF was informed in advance by Germans of the Vel d’Hiver operation so it could prepare food for those to be arrested. It kept the information to itself almost until the last minute in order not to cause panic among the Jewish population.43 In August, it even wrote to Pétain, thanking him for the protection offered to French Jews.
French Jewish leaders clung desperately to the idea that Vichy would not betray the French Jews. It was not surprising that Helbronner should feel relatively reassured when comparing his cordial meetings with Vallat to those with Dannecker who ostentatiously called for a bowl of water to wash his hands after going to the Consistory. Far from shielding French Jews, however, Vichy helped to lull them into a false sense of security. One of the UGIF leaders was Raymond-Raoul Lambert, who had once enjoyed the confidence of many leading French politicians. His wartime diaries testify to his good faith, decency, and tragic naivety. ‘One has to play on the sincerity of Vallat’, he wrote. He found Vallat ‘correct’, ‘cordial’, ‘open and frank’. In June 1941, he anguished whether to send his children to New York: ‘I will remain a Frenchman until my death, but if the French nation legally rejects me from its midst, do I have the right to decide that my children must be pariahs?’ He named his daughter, born in January 1942, Marie-France, as an act of ‘affirmation and hope’.44 In December 1943, Lambert was deported to Auschwitz along with his wife and all four children; none of them returned.
The UGIF never fully broke with legality, and some historians have accused it of culpable complicity in the Final Solution.45 Although it cannot be compared to that of the East European Judenräte—it did not organize convoys—it certainly failed to provide France’s Jews with inspiring leadership. Some of its leaders believed that its activities as a relief organization justified unpalatable compromises. The UGIF’s complacency emerged in the way it treated the orphan children in its care. Keen to respect legality, it lodged them in residences whose names were registered with the police. This exposed them to the risk of arbitrary arrest. Even in 1944, when the danger had become all too clear, the UGIF leadership in Paris rejected a plan by a Jewish resistance group to organize the escape of children remaining in UGIF residences in the Paris area. Between 20 and 24 July 1944 the residences were raided by the Gestapo: 233 children were arrested and taken to Drancy. Over 200 of them were deported to Auschwitz on 31 July.46
The immigrant Jews, who often had previous experience of persecution, were psychologically better equipped to respond to it than French Jews. In Paris, their numerous relief organizations decided to co-ordinate their action in the so-called Amelot Committee (after the street in which it met). The Communists had a specific immigrant organization—the Immigrant Workers’ Movement (MOI)—grouped into language sections. The Yiddish one was the most important, with about 250 members, although Jews were also scattered among other language groups (Poles, Hungarians, and Romanians). MOI published a clandestine yiddish paper, Unzer Wort, and was also linked to a Communist relief organization called Solidarité.47
At first, the Communist Jewish leaders were as unsure how to act as anyone. When the Germans ordered Jews to register in September 1940, neither Solidarité nor MOI called for non-compliance. Their leaders submitted to the census like most Jews. Similarly, they were totally unprepared for the first round-up of Jews in May 1941. Looking back on their attitude subsequently, one of the MOI leaders, Louis Gronowski, wrote:
In the light of the Holocaust I have wondered if our attitude at the time was right, and if we should not have, from the start, called on the Jewish population to disobey the Vichy ordinances. But it was unimaginable, at that moment, to envisage the idea of thousands of people crossing into illegality overnight. Besides, our minds had not yet taken on board the horrors inflicted on the world by the Nazis.48
Who knew what is one of the most vexed questions about the Holocaust. Evidence about the extermination of the Jews was filtering out by the middle of 1942. But what does ‘knowing’ mean? The images of Auschwitz, which haunt our imagination, did not exist. Raymond Aron, who spent the war in London, where much information was available, wrote later: ‘What did we know of the genocide?… I must confess that I did not imagine it, and because I could not imagine it, I did not know.’49 Similarly Georges Wellers, a Jewish doctor in Drancy for two and a half years, until being deported in 1944, wrote that he did not ‘know’ even on arrival at the gates of Auschwitz: ‘one had to be mad to believe it’. The children in Drancy invented the name Pitchipoi for the destination of which they knew so little, but which we know as Auschwitz.50
MOI and Solidarité were the first organizations to start warning the Jews. Solidarité published a tract in May 1941 denouncing the recent arrests. It organized clandestine committees in the Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande camps, and demonstrations outside the camp gates by wives of the internees.51 When, in August, Radio Moscow broadcast an appeal to world Jewry by a Soviet Yiddish poet, David Bergelson, warning that Polish Jews were facing extermination, Solidarité reproduced the text in Yiddish and French. At this stage, there was little to support such allegations, but when the first deportation convoy left Compiègne in March 1942, they seemed less far-fetched. MOI urged activists in the internment camps to inform the wives of inmates that their husbands were being sent to their deaths. Some activists, however, were reluctant to do this, fearing that it would only spread panic.52
Despite these doubts among immigrant Jewish leaders about how to respond, the first round-ups in May and August 1941 had already led many Jews—French and foreign—to take their destiny into their own hands. Philippe Erlanger escaped the December 1941 round-up by slipping to the South, but not his friend René Blum, who saw this as desertion: Blum was arrested in December 1941 and later died in Auschwitz.53 For most Jews, however, the moment of truth was the Vel d’Hiver round-up in July 1942. That day has been vividly described by the historian Annie Kriegel, who was 15 years old at the time. On the morning of 16 July, she encountered the following sight on turning into the Rue de Turenne in the Jewish quarter where she lived:
I saw a policeman in uniform who was carrying a suitcase in each hand and crying. I distinctly remember those tears running down a rugged, rather reddish face because you would agree that it is rare to see a policeman cry in public. He walked down the street, followed by a small group of children and old people carrying little bundles…It was the round-up… I continued on my way when at the crossroads… I heard screams rising to the heavens: not cries and squawks such as you hear in noisy and excited crowds, but the sort of screams you hear in hospital delivery rooms.
At a loss what to do, she sat down on a park bench and waited: ‘It was on that bench that I left my childhood.’54 At the same time, the Jews of France collectively lost their innocence. Thousands went into hiding; others turned to resistance.
Jewish Resistance
One can distinguish three categories of Jewish resistance: first, individual French Jews in the general Resistance; secondly, specifically Jewish organizations in the general Resistance; thirdly, Resistance organizations (not necessarily comprising Jews alone) with specifically Jewish objectives.55
Many individual French Jews played a significant role in Resistance movements. One of the most important movements, Franc-Tireur, was led by a Jew, Jean-Pierre Lévy; among its other members was Marc Bloch. Another prominent Jewish resister, Daniel Mayer, founded the clandestine Socialist Party. There were also many Jews in de Gaulle’s Free French. But none of these ind
ividuals were acting specifically as Jews: Mayer claimed to be a Socialist first, a Frenchman second, and a Jew third. Another French Jewish resister, Léo Hamon, said that for him joining the Resistance was the ‘deliberate choice of France’.56
The second category—specifically Jewish Resistance organizations—included the tiny Jewish Army (Armée juive), the brainchild of two Russian-born Zionists, David Knout and Abraham Polonski. Based in Toulouse, they began in 1940 to organize young Zionists into commando groups for eventual military action against the Germans. Recruits trained under a Jewish flag, and underwent an initiation ceremony, swearing a Hebrew oath. Armed units were also organized by the EIF after it was banned in 1943. In 1944, these two organizations combined into the Jewish Combat Organization (OJC). They attracted about 400 members, and at the Liberation they fought alongside the general resistance forces, although keeping their blue and white armbands.57
No Jews were more active in the armed resistance than the Communists of the MOI. After the Communist Party turned to armed action in the summer of 1941, it set up a specialized military-terrorist branch, the FTP, which had a special immigrant section (FTP-MOI). The fifty to sixty members of the Jewish section of the FTP-MOI carried out most of the Communists’ guerrilla operations in Paris. There has, however, been much debate among historians whether this should be characterized as Jewish resistance.58 Were the members of the MOI resisting as Jews or Communists? Certainly they did not target specifically Jewish objectives. Their most spectacular operation was the assassination in 1943 of Julius Ritter, who, as Sauckel’s representative in France, was responsible for implementing the STO—a policy not aimed at the Jews. In December 1943, one of the Jewish Communist organizers, Adam Rayski, refused to countenance any ‘hierarchy of atrocities committed by the Nazis’ when it came to deciding whether ‘to give priority to the Jewish question or the question of the deportation of the French [STO]’.59 This has led some Jewish historians to argue that the MOI’s activities had little relevance to the specific circumstances of the Jews. Nothing, for example, was done to attack Jewish deportation trains.
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