An interesting argument to show how the MOI did serve the interests of the Jews is offered by Annie Kriegel who joined MOI herself, once her family had escaped South after the Vel d’Hiver round-up. Many of the Jewish fighters in the MOI were extremely young—often adolescents—and had lost their entire families. Kriegel argues that the Communist Jewish Resistance restored a sense of identity to these young Jews whose lives had been shattered by the events of 1942, and contributed to their own psychological survival. She writes:
To understand [these young Jewish Communist resisters] it is necessary to start from one basic fact: the brutal collapse for them of all those systems of protection, even if sometimes oppressive, which an individual acquires from belonging to a regulated society. Homeland, name, family, house, school, neighbourhood, work, everything which provides a point of fixity, and definition of self, had been swallowed up in nothingness. The revolt of adolescents, we are told, usually aims to throw off the constraints imposed on them by the generation of their elders: it was on the contrary to restore these constraints, often in the name of their father who had gone, that so many adolescents feverishly demanded arms… Thus the resistance provided membership of a group, a narrow group, but one which was tightly structured and hierarchical, the reconstitution of a network of interpersonal relations where the survival of each depended on the solidarity of all the others. The slow, repetitive but regular round of tasks… the incredible intensity and variety of material and intellectual effort which the tiniest of operations required, once again peopled the days with faces and gave them back a savour and a value, an existence freighted with both fear and hope.60
Even if it was true that the Communist Jewish Resistance put the interests of the Communists before the fate of the Jews, it was also true that no other group did more to disseminate information about the fate of the Jews. A few days before the Vel d’Hiver arrests, Solidarité distributed a tract warning Jews to go into hiding. Two Communist Jewish leaders penetrated into the Vel d’Hiver and produced a clandestine pamphlet describing the conditions in the stadium. This was one of the few documents produced by the entire Resistance on the Vel d’Hiver round-up.61 Jewish Communist propaganda was not restricted to the immigrant Jewish community or the Yiddish language. The autumn of 1942 saw the setting up of the National Movement against Racism (MNCR), to develop solidarity between Jews and non-Jews. This was effectively a Communist front organization, but in October 1942 its French language paper, J’Accuse, published the news that gas was being used on Jews.62
Informing Jews of the danger confronting them was a step to saving them from it. The next step was to organize help that went beyond the legalism of the UGIF. This brings us to the third category of Jewish resistance: saving Jews from deportation. Although this did not involve fighting the Germans, the term ‘resistance’ seems appropriate since the purpose was to thwart a fundamental Nazi objective. Rescuing Jews, although an underground activity, was undertaken primarily by organizations which had originally enjoyed a legal existence, and found themselves pulled into illegality. In Paris, the Amelot Committee continued to provide relief and medical care, but also started to produce false papers and smuggle children across the line. By the autumn of 1943, its leaders had been arrested, and its legal existence ceased entirely. The Communist MNCR also organized networks for Jewish children, and, unlike the Amelot Committee, it was prepared to work outside immigrant communities. But rescue was never a primary objective of the Communist Jewish resistance.63
In the South, a major role was played by the Children’s Relief Organization (OSE), founded in 1912 after the Russian pogroms. In 1940 and 1941, it worked to improve the conditions of children in the internment camps. By the end of 1942, it was engaged in clandestine activity to save Jewish children: smuggling them across the borders, forging papers, or arranging hiding places. One escape network run from Lyons by a Jewish engineer, Georges Garel, and operating under the legal cover of the OSE, managed to hide about 1,600 children. Another network, run from Nice by a Syrian Jew, Moussa Abadi, dispersed about 500 children in orphanages, convents, and schools. The OSE also had its own legal centres for children, but, as the German arrests became more arbitrary, it started to close these and disperse the children. Tragically, at the OSE centre at Izieu, the Germans arrived just before the children were about to be moved. However, overall the OSE saved between 7,500 and 9,000 children.64
Rescue efforts would not have succeeded without the complicity of non-Jews: many children were looked after by non-Jewish families or hidden in religious institutions. As Garel said: ‘In every department or diocese there was a religious or lay, public or private charity or institution which involved itself in the protection of our children.’ In short, the fate of France’s Jews cannot be understood without examining the response of the population at large.
French Society and the Jews 1940–1942: Indifference and Hostility
During the first two years of Occupation, the prevailing sentiment towards the Jews ranged from indifference to hostility. The first Jewish Statute aroused little interest. People had more pressing concerns on their minds. Only fourteen out of forty-two prefects in the Unoccupied Zone reported any reaction at all— unfavourable in four cases.65 One exception to this general indifference was the Protestant leader Pastor Boegner who wrote a much-publicized letter to the Chief Rabbi on 26 March 1941 protesting against the Statute. But he accepted that there was a ‘problem’ regarding recent Jewish immigrants; Catholic leaders said nothing.66
Indifference to the fate of the Jews was not the same as non-involvement in it. The application of both Statutes drew people into complicity with anti-Semitism. It was the professional organizations of doctors, dentists, lawyers, and architects who administered the quotas in their professions; it was the universities who excluded Jewish teachers; it was the COs who helped to administer Aryanization; it was prefectoral officials who organized censuses. The fact that the Statutes relied upon the co-operation of people who were not necessarily virulent anti-Semites makes their participation all the more significant—just as within the government, the anti-Semitic, but ineffectual Bonnard, probably did less active harm to the Jews than his respected predecessor Carcopino who applied the Statute to the education system, and even proposed the idea (never implemented) of a quota of Jewish students.67
The Jewish Statutes were applied with few visible scruples. By March 1942, approximately 3,400 public servants had been dismissed in metropolitan France, and another 2,500 in Algeria. There was little opposition in the universities although twelve of the university rectors had been appointed under the Popular Front. The administrative machine operated with implacable efficiency: two jurists teaching respectively in Brazil and Indochina received notice of their dismissal on 19 December 1940, exactly the same day as their colleagues in France. The only academic who refused, in November 1940, to apply the law was Gustave Monod, a top-ranking academic in the University of Paris, and member of a distinguished Protestant dynasty. Monod was relieved of his duties and went back to teaching in a lycée.68 Sometimes the ‘last class’ was the occasion of moving scenes. But there were no organized student protests of the kind that occurred in Holland or Belgium. The difference was that in France the exclusion measures had been imposed by the French government not the Germans. According to a survey carried out in the Southern Zone by the Jewish Commissariat in 1943, students were among the social categories most hostile to Jews.69
There were few problems in the application of quotas to the professions although it is difficult to generalize. In Marseilles, the Order of Doctors set about implementing the quota with zeal. By May 1943, ninety-five Jewish doctors in the département had lost the right to practise. But this did not stop the Order complaining to the Commissariat in July 1942 that Jews in medical schools enjoyed an unfair advantage because they did not lose study time in the Chantiers.70 In the medical profession, fear about foreign competition had been intense in the 1930s, but Vichy quotas also concerned
French Jews. In Paris, however, the Order of Doctors defied the law by allowing 203 doctors to practise when there should only have been 108.71 In Marseilles, only architects delayed in applying the quotas to their profession, for what reason is unclear.72
Lawyers, who applied the quotas as smoothly as in other professions, were drawn into even greater complicity with the anti-Semitic legislation.73 The notion of race contained in the Jewish Statutes was unprecedented in French jurisprudence, and definitions of Jewishness were open to interpretation. Lawyers had a field day, and an entirely new branch of law developed. One problem was whether it fell to the State to prove Jewishness, or to the individual to prove the contrary. Lawyers defending Jewish clients could hardly be blamed for entering into these debates, but what about the jurists who wrote learned commentaries on the Statutes? In 1941, Maurice Duverger, later to become a celebrated political scientist of left-wing sympathies, was a young jurist making his name when he published a commentary on the legal implications of the Jewish Statutes. His phraseology certainly seems to have adopted the assumptions of the law’s drafters—‘If one adopts the religious criterion it is to be feared that most Jews will feign a conversion’—but even if one accepts Duverger’s subsequent defence that technical commentary did not imply approbation, such professional neutrality assisted the ‘normalization’ of something which had no precedent in France. Detachment was more insidious than overt anti-Semitism.74
Duverger’s case became notorious when his article was exhumed for polemical purposes in the 1960s—causing two libel cases which he won—but there was nothing extraordinary about his article in itself. No commentary on the Jewish Statutes in the specialized legal press expressed any reservations. Yet dissent was not impossible in Vichy France. Jacques Charpentier, head of the Paris Bar Council, criticized Pétain at the time of the Riom trial for abusing his power by delivering the verdict in advance. About the Jewish legislation, however, Charpentier said nothing, probably because he believed that, as he wrote quite unself-consciously in his post-war memoirs, ‘there had always been a Jewish problem’ at the Paris Bar.75 The Conseil d’État, France’s ultimate court of appeal in disputes between the State and individuals, also adapted itself remarkably easily to this legislation so at odds with republican tradition. When it came to deciding on exemptions from the Statutes, the Conseil (having purged itself of its own Jewish members) tended towards severity.76 Whether the attitude of the legal profession was an example of the pitfalls of strict legal positivism, or whether the prevailing anti-Semitic assumptions made the legal community only too receptive to the new laws, the fact is that the French legal profession applied them with no visible scruples.
Was this mixture of indifference to the fate of the Jews, and complicity in their persecution, enough to characterize the attitude of the French population as one of active anti-Semitism? Not in the view of the CGQJ which monitored public opinion and frequently bemoaned the lack of anti-Semitism, although its standards in the matter were exacting.77 Labroue’s lectures at the Sorbonne were a disaster: at the first one, describing Jewish racial characteristics, he was booed; the following ones were almost unattended.78 The exhibition on the Jew and France was visited by over 350,000 people. Was this a lot or a little? It was certainly less than other exhibitions organized by the Germans, but perhaps this was because it was held later than them.79 The German anti-Semitic film Jew Süss was a major box-office success. It did cause demonstrations in Lyons and Bourg-en-Bresse in 1941, but (to show how difficult it is to generalize) it was cheered in Marseilles a year later.80
The reactions of the population to the Jews were less sympathetic in the Free Zone, where anti-Semitic legislation had the imprimatur of the Vichy regime, than in the Occupied Zone. In the South, the Exodus had swelled the number of Jews in some localities (especially the Côte d’Azur) or brought Jews to places where almost none had existed before (especially some rural communities in the south-west). In Nice, where the SOL and PPF were strong, anti-Semitic incidents were frequent. In the Occupied Zone, which meant essentially Paris, where all but about 20,000 Jews were concentrated, the Jewish population was if anything smaller than before, and the anti-Semitic measures were directly associated with the Germans. The Jewish journalist Jacques Biélinky, who kept a careful diary of people’s reactions, encountered few signs of anti-Semitism. He observed that when Jewish-owned shops were required to put up a special sign, many of them reported an increase in non-Jewish clients offering solidarity. He noted that sellers of Au pilori received frequent abuse from passers-by.81 One Jewish observer commented at this time about the Free Zone: ‘here we can still move around freely and don’t fear arrest at any moment. But as for the attitude of the French, one feels more at home in France in the Occupied Zone.’82
Nor did the Resistance or Free French display much concern for the Jews at first. No speech of de Gaulle specifically mentioned the Jews although he did send messages to the World Jewish Congress (November 1940) and the American Jewish Congress (August 1941) condemning anti-Semitic measures. One of de Gaulle’s followers, René Cassin, condemned the anti-Semitic legislation on the BBC on 12 April 1941, but it was specifically to the French Jews that he addressed himself. Another Free French member, Pierre Tissier, wrote in 1942, in a book published in London: ‘the Jewish problem does exist in France… [the Jew] instead of attaching himself to the territory in which he lives, maintains his international links’.83 When Jean Moulin arrived in London in October 1941 his report on France said nothing about anti-Semitic persecution although it mentioned other aspects of Vichy repression. With a few exceptions this indifference reflected the attitude of the Resistance within France until at least the second half of 1941.
The discretion of the Resistance regarding anti-Semitism has to be carefully interpreted. Sometimes it did signify indifference to the Jews, even sympathy with the Vichy policy, but it must be remembered that there were many Jews in the Resistance. In their case, the silence had other causes. For French Jews to link their opposition to Vichy to their Jewishness, risked conceding Vichy’s case that they were not French citizens like any other. On hearing about the Jewish Statute, Roger Stéphane felt ‘humiliated’ at the idea that ‘from today I will be suspected of opposing Vichy only because I am a Jew’. When in 1944 Pierre Mendès France, who ran the Free French finances, was asked to provide funds for some Jewish children who had been rescued from France, he agreed. But, as a French Jew himself, he went on to specify: ‘they are French children to be saved and I do not know of any special category called French Jews’.84
The Resistance did become more critical of Vichy’s anti-Semitism in the second half of 1941, but the same was not true of public opinion. On the contrary, in some areas resentment of Jews increased in the first half of 1942. As food shortages got worse, Jews were accused of being black marketeers. These feelings were strongest in the Côte d’Azur and the rural south-west—Dordogne, Limousin—where Jewish refugees attracted the opprobrium attaching to all outsiders in times of difficulty.85
French Society and the Jews 1942–1944: Solidarity and Rescue
The events of the summer of 1942 transformed French responses to the plight of the Jews. Already in June 1942, the authorities noted the adverse reaction of the Parisian population to the imposition of the yellow star. Most people affected not to notice the star, a response appreciated by Jews, who feared being the object of ostentatious curiosity. Perhaps what some Jews, desperate for reassurance, interpreted as sympathy was really indifference, but there were also open manifestations of solidarity. Some people even put on stars in sympathy, and were punished by being sent to Drancy.86 Biélinky witnessed many more examples of active sympathy than of hostility: twice he witnessed shopkeepers singling out Jews in food queues to serve them first. On 8 June 1942 he wrote:
First day out with my star: in the street no one pays any attention to my decoration, nor at the tobacconist or newsagent. A neighbour whom I meet… says hello to me as amiably as alway
s…In the milk queue all my acquaintances greet me amiably, and we chat as usual. No hostile looks…A wife of a friend of mine went to the cheese shop where white cheese was being distributed person by person. To show her sympathy the shopkeeper gave her two cheeses. Lobermann’s daughter was very scared she might lose her Catholic friends. In fact, they all came to her house to show their sympathy and then wanted to go out with her wearing her decoration.
Guéhenno, who had no indulgence for the behaviour of his compatriots, also noted that the star had led people to show sympathy to the Jews.87 It should be noted, however, that similar reactions were recorded by the Jewish writer Victor Klemperer to the imposition of the star in Berlin in September 1941.88
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