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by Jackson, Julian

The real turning point in French public opinion came with the arrests of the summer of 1942.89 In Paris in July, and then in the South in August, people were shocked by the horrifying scenes of screaming children being arrested with their parents or being forcibly separated from them. All prefects’ reports in the summer of 1942 mentioned popular reactions to the arrests of Jews; in almost all cases to report outrage. One woman from the small town of Saint-Girons in the Ariège wrote to the Marshal: ‘France has dishonoured herself in inflicting such cruel treatment on people who thought they were finding an asylum in our country. We are ashamed to be French, to be Christian… and the veneration which surrounds your person had been unsettled if not indeed swept away.’90 By no means everyone demonstrated open sympathy to the Jews—in the round-ups there were helpful and indifferent concierges, sympathetic and brutal police—but for the first time the issue was forced on everyone’s attention.

  On Sunday 23 August 1942, the Archbishop of Toulouse, Cardinal Saliège, at last broke the silence of the Catholic Church. In the cathedral, he read out a pastoral letter unequivocally condemning the arrests and reminding his listeners that the Jews were ‘our brothers’. This message was read out in every church in the diocese, despite being forbidden by the prefect. Saliège’s example was followed by four other leading prelates: Bishop Théas of Montauban, Archbishop Gerlier of Lyons, Bishops Delay of Marseilles and Moussaron of Albi. The last three were more restrained in their condemnation—Gerlier admitted that there was a ‘problem to resolve’—but this counted less than the cumulative impact of the messages. Five bishops and archbishops out of thirty-five (in the Southern Zone) were perhaps not many, but their messages received wide publicity. The Resistance press that had been so discreet on the Jewish issue joined the chorus of condemnation.91

  By the end of the year, however, the outrage had died down. After Gerlier and Pétain met in October, the Church and Vichy seemed to have made it up. The public also seemed to lose interest in the Jews, perhaps because although the deportations continued throughout 1943, there were no more massive roundups on the scale of 1942. The introduction of the STO also diverted attention away from the Jews: in 1943 the term déporté described labour recruits not Jews. To some people, indeed, the Jews now appeared as privileged because they were not liable for labour service.92 But something had irrevocably changed in the summer of 1942. The open protests may not have lasted, but they gave way to active solidarity and the development of an infrastructure to aid the Jews.

  The first rescue efforts were spontaneous and improvised. During the roundup in the Lyons region in August 1942, Jewish children had been parked in a disused barracks at Vénisseux outside Lyons. Exploiting the confusion whether or not the children were to be deported, the OSE representatives had managed to get about 100 of them out. Amitié chrétienne, an organization run by two Catholic priests, Pierre Chaillet and the Abbé Alexandre Glasberg, helped to place the children in safety, dispersing them in religious houses and among Catholic families. When the prefect heard what had happened, he asked for the children to be given up. Chaillet refused and was supported by his superior, Archbishop Gerlier.

  This was the start of more formal links between Jewish rescue organizations and sympathetic Catholics. Amitié chrétienne, which had been founded to help foreign refugees, set up a clandestine operation to help Jews. Its activities were brought to an end in the spring of 1943 when the Gestapo raided its offices, and Chaillet went into hiding. The Jewish rescue network set up by Georges Garel, himself involved in the Vénisseux rescue, began after he visited Archbishop Saliège of Toulouse. Saliège gave Garrel entry to religious institutions in his diocese where Jewish children could be hidden. Moussa Abadi’s network in Nice was assisted by Bishop Paul Rémond who offered Abadi a cover by appointing him ‘inspector of independent education’ and gave him a room in the bishopric from which to operate. The nuns of the order of Notre-Dame-de-Sion in Paris sheltered children and placed around 450 of them in non-Jewish families in the region. In Lyons the nuns of the same order specialized in forging identity papers. Father Pierre Marie-Benoît, a Capuchin friar based in Marseilles, intervened with the Italian authorities to transfer some 30,000 Jews to the Italian Zone of occupation after November 1942. He was also responsible for helping up to 4,000 Jews escape to Switzerland.93

  Even more important was the help provided by the Protestants. This was initiated by CIMADE, a Protestant organization founded in 1939 to help refugees. Continuing its work among inhabitants of the camps after 1940, it contacted sympathetic pastors willing to provide refuges for children in their communities. Many of these were in the Cévennes, a mountainous area of the Languedoc with a large Protestant population. The Protestants of this area viewed the persecuted Jews in the light of their own history of resistance to persecution from the French Catholic state over the centuries. In numerous small Cévennes communities, hundreds of Jews took refuge, relying on the support and complicity of almost the entire population. In the village of Saint-Germain-de-Calberte, for example, eight Jewish families—including Greeks, Russians, Hungarians, and Poles—were hidden in the hotel; another five Jews were hidden by the local schoolteacher; and when a non-Jewish family in the hotel wrote a letter of denunciation, it was intercepted at the village post office.94 Nowhere saved more Jews than the isolated Protestant village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon (Haute-Loire). Under the leadership of their pastor, André Trocmé, the 3,000 villagers hid around 5,000 Jews during the Occupation, some for a few days, some for months, even years. When the police arrived, the children would be dispersed in the thick local forests. Trocmé was arrested in February 1943 and released after a month. He then went into hiding, and his wife, Magda, continued the rescue work.95

  Large numbers of Jews, however, were saved not by organized rescue networks, but by the spontaneous actions of individuals from all walks of life: Auguste Boyer, the guard at the Les Milles camps near Marseilles, who helped several inmates escape in 1942 before being himself arrested and tortured; Jean Chaigneau, prefect of the Alpes-Maritimes, who destroyed the lists of Jews held at the prefecture; Camille Matthieu, a guard at Drancy who assisted the escape of Simon Fuks, a Paris tailor, and then hid his whole family for the rest of the Occupation at his mother’s house in a village in the Aude.96

  Many Jewish children owed their lives to the efforts of such individuals. Pavel-Saul Friedländer, today a historian at Tel Aviv, was 9 years old in 1940 when his family, who had escaped the previous year from Prague to Paris, settled in the small town of Neris-les-Bains in the Allier. He was befriended by a local librarian who placed him, with the consent of his parents, in a Catholic boarding school at Montluçon. Friedländer’s parents were themselves deported to Auschwitz on 4 November 1942; they were never to return.97

  Pierre Vidal-Naquet, today a classical historian in Paris, was 10 when his family arrived in Marseilles in 1940. The Vidal-Naquets were a distinguished French Jewish family, Republican and fiercely patriotic. His father was a lawyer barred from practising by Vichy’s Jewish legislation. On 15 May 1944 the Gestapo arrived to arrest him and his wife. Pierre was not at home, and one of his school-teachers organized a group of fellow pupils to track the boy down and prevent him returning home. Thanks to this intervention Pierre was saved, along with his two brothers and sister. His parents perished in Auschwitz. For the rest of the Occupation, the children were put up by an old Protestant lady in the village of Sainte-Agrève (Ardèche), about 10 miles from Chambon, and later in the village of Dieulefit (Drôme). These were both Cévennes villages with large Protestant communities.98

  Stanley Hoffmann, today a political scientist at Harvard, was 12 in 1940. Born in Vienna, and technically an Austrian citizen, he had been bought up in France. Although baptised Protestant, he was Jewish according to Vichy’s laws. He and his mother spent the Occupation in Nice; his uncle, who stayed in Paris, was deported to Germany in 1943. In Nice, Hoffmann encountered some anti-Semitism from his schoolmates, but also kindness from some of
his teachers. When the Germans arrived in Nice in September 1943, he and his mother practised the art of escaping from the balcony of their flat to the roof in case the knock on the door should come. After three months, the strain became too much. The boy’s history teacher forged identity papers for them, and they spent the rest of the Occupation in the tiny spa of Lamalou-les-Bains in the Languedoc. In the end, Hoffmann’s memories of his own experience were positive: ‘one should not expect a nation to be made only of heroes, but one could ask for decency, and decency prevailed’.99 When the film The Sorrow and the Pity came out in 1971, Hoffmann felt unable to accept fully its bleak vision of the French under Occupation. In his article on the film, he wrote:

  In my memory, the schoolteacher… who taught me French history, gave me hope in the worst days, dried my tears when my best friend was deported along with his mother, and gave false papers to my mother and me so that we could flee a Gestapo-infested city in which the complicity of friends and neighbours was no longer a guarantee of safety—this man wipes out all the bad moments, and the humiliations, and the terrors. He and his wife were not Resistance heroes, but if there is an average Frenchman, it was this man.100

  In the end, there is no single reason why a higher number of Jews from France survived the war than in much of the rest of Western Europe.101 Throughout Nazi Europe, the fate of the Jews depended on a variety of factors: the presence of an independent government able to interpose itself between the Jews and the Germans; the willingness of such a government to do so; the numbers of German occupation troops; the timing of German anti-Jewish policies; the reactions of public opinion and the organizations which expressed it; the effectiveness of rescue networks; the geography and topography of the country; the size and distribution of the Jewish population.

  None of these factors was decisive in itself, and what mattered was how they combined. Holland and Belgium are both small and highly urbanized countries, but only a quarter of Jews survived in Holland as opposed to almost two-thirds in Belgium. Holland witnessed significant public protests against anti-Semitism in the autumn of 1940 and again in February 1941, but Dutch rescue networks were less effective than those in Belgium. It may also have been significant that the Nazi Party had more influence in Holland, which was run by a Reichskommissar, than in Belgium, where the army was in charge.102 By the time it was clear what fate awaited the Dutch Jews, most of them had been concentrated into three ghetto districts of Amsterdam. Geography—proximity to Sweden— may have saved the Jews of Denmark, but it was not enough to help those of Norway, most of whom perished. The successful rescue of the Danish Jews was due to the combination of factors: the obstructiveness of the government, the solidarity of civil society, the effectiveness of the rescue networks, and the fact that the Germans, reluctant to antagonize the Danish government, did not act against the Jews until the summer of 1943.

  How many of these factors operated in France? In the first place, was the existence of the Vichy regime in any way beneficial to the Jews? Annie Kriegel, despite her wartime involvement in the Jewish Communist Resistance, later came to believe that without the existence of an independent French government, even more Jews would have perished, as in Holland and Belgium where independent governments did not exist. Even if one were to accept this argument—and it is true that on a very few occasions Vichy did say ‘no’ to the Germans: refusing to impose the star in the Unoccupied Zone in June 1942 or to denaturalize more Jews in August 1943—the question should be not how many Jews Vichy’s existence did save, but how many more its existence could have saved if the will had been there. But in fact Kriegel’s argument is unconvincing. The safest place for the Jews of France was not the so-called Free Zone; it was the Italian zone of occupation (as long as it lasted). The truth is that without Vichy’s co-operation, it would have been impossible for the Germans to arrest as many Jews as they did. This is clear if one compares the results of the Vel d’Hiver operation in July 1942 with those of the Brunner operation in Nice just over a year later.

  The Germans’ failure to round up as many Jews as they had hoped in Nice can also be ascribed to the later date of the operation. In 1942, the Vel d’Hiver operation had been a bolt from the blue; in 1943, the Jews knew what to expect, and rescue networks had been created. Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton, however, are not convinced of the importance of such factors. They claim that, in the last analysis, the survival rate of the Jews depended on ‘the degree to which the Nazis were willing and able to apply themselves to their task’.103 But in all cases this willingness and ability were not independent variables. They were a function of other factors such as the reactions of civil society and the attitudes of the governments with which they had to deal. On the other hand, it is true that once the Nazis in France pursued their murderous task without restraint of any kind, as was the case in 1944, there was an increase in the rate of arrests— despite the fact that the French police had almost ceased to co-operate and that rescue networks were in existence.

  Nonetheless the role of rescue networks was crucial in explaining the survival of many thousands of Jews, especially children. Why were these efforts so successful? Undoubtedly geography was important: France was a large and mountainous country, sharing borders with two non-belligerent countries, Spain and Switzerland. Possibly some 44,000 Jews escaped across these two frontiers, 24,000 legally and 20,000 illegally.104 Chronology was also important: the existence of the Italian safe haven until September 1943 won the Jews valuable time. But in the end the effectiveness of the rescue organizations required the solidarity, passive or active, formal or informal, of the French population. For 150 years the Jews of France had looked to the State to protect them, if necessary, from the sudden anti-Semitic outbursts of civil society; in the Occupation, it was civil society that helped to protect the Jews from the State.

  The experience of the Jews under Vichy offers more general lessons for the history of Occupied France. It reveals the extent to which Vichy, like any authoritarian state, relied for its effectiveness on consent and approval from its population. Vichy’s anti-Semitism in 1940–1 was the aspect of the National Revolution which seems to have aroused the least opposition: the complicity of civil society considerably facilitated the implementation of that policy. Once the anti-Semitic consensus was shattered in 1942, the effectiveness of State anti-Semitism was undermined by the ‘resistance’ of civil society. The saving of Jewish lives can certainly be categorized as a form of ‘resistance’, although different from the more well-known forms of resistance like sabotage, the planting of bombs, or the production of propaganda. It was a resistance which relied upon the complicity of the population as a whole. However much Vichy tried to exclude the Jews from France, the effectiveness of Jewish resistance was intimately linked to the responses of civil society. The same, as we shall see, was to be true of the Resistance as a whole.

  Part IV

  The Resistance

  Introduction to Part IV

  When Jean Moulin arrived in London in October 1941 with his report on the situation in France, he used various terms to characterize the movements of opposition to the Occupation: ‘French patriots’, people ‘professing Anglophilia’, ‘Anglophile movements’, a ‘surge of revolt and popular indignation’, ‘degaullists’. Once he also referred to the ‘movements of French resistance’, but never to ‘resisters’ nor to ‘the Resistance’.1 Moulin’s uncertainty about terminology demonstrates the novelty of what came to be called ‘the Resistance’. The word itself had no particular historical resonance. Creating ‘resistance’ involved creating the idea of the Resistance. In the nineteenth century, the ‘party of the resistance’ described the conservative Orleanists who opposed the July Monarchy.2 There had been ‘resisters’ to the German occupation of northern France and Belgium in the First World War, but there had been no ‘Resistance’. One early resistance group in 1940 alighted on the word ‘Resistance’ for its associations with the struggle of the Huguenots against the French monarchy.3
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  Certainly the word ‘resistance’ was used from the beginning of the Occupation, but the meanings attached to it were not precise. In his first speech from London on 18 June 1940, de Gaulle declared: ‘the flame of French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished’. He was using the term in the military sense of armed resistance: ‘every Frenchman who is still armed has the absolute duty to continue the resistance’. The word ‘resistance’ was used differently by another general, the air-force officer Gabriel Cochet, who had, unlike de Gaulle, chosen to remain in France. In September 1940, Cochet circulated a tract calling on people to ‘resist and unite’. He conceived resistance primarily as a state of mind: ‘moral force in the absence of material force, the will to resist given the absence of means to resist’. Different again was the use of the term ‘resistance’ by a group based in Paris’s anthropological museum, the Musée de l’homme. In December 1940, they had started producing a newspaper called Résistance. For them resistance meant organizing groups in France to carry out practical tasks: collating information about the enemy, helping Allied airmen to escape.

  Even when the word ‘resistance’ had acquired a more fixed meaning, the history of the Resistance remained many histories. Several distinctions need to be made. The most important is between London and France, between de Gaulle’s Free French and the metropolitan Resistance. De Gaulle’s first speech had not been addressed to the people of France, but to Frenchmen abroad, or Frenchmen who might be able to come abroad. He was thinking of resistance outside France not within it. His argument was that the British were not beaten and that the British had at their disposal the resources of the American economy. In short, the conflict would become a world war, and the French must once again become part of it. From the end of 1941, the history of de Gaulle’s Free French starts to converge with the history of the Resistance in France, but they always remained distinct. Many metropolitan resisters resented the fact that the start of resistance had come to be associated with de Gaulle. One of them, Henry Frenay, recalled: ‘It was not at the call of the General that we rose up.’4 Most early resisters had not even heard de Gaulle’s speech of 18 June.