Bousquet's round-ups began on 5 August at Noé and Récédébou camps near Toulouse, but his major onslaught mostly took place between 26 and 28 August—this is when the first Jews from the Vichy synagogue would have been taken, though it was permitted to stay open until the end of 1943, thus ensuring more bodies for deportation. Bousquet used the census Vallat had prepared: “Eliazar Davidovici of Esperaza,” presumed to be Jewish because of his name, and “One (1) Jew, thatch merchant, rue du Pont” probably disappeared on this occasion.
At first Bousquet gave Jewish parents his version of Sophie's choice: they could leave their children under eighteen behind, or take them with them. Most left them—with neighbours, with strangers, with whoever was there, with all those who tried to help: “Eyewitnesses will never forget the moment when these truckloads of children left the camps, with parents trying in one last gaze to fix an image to last an eternity.” The people of Béziers who watched these “atrocious separations”44 reacted with “profound indignation, for despite the early hours of the morning the population witnessed heartrending scenes.”45 When Bousquet changed the rules, after 18 August, he deported children over the age of two, and set about recalling those who had been let go before that date; he was particularly repetitive in his instructions about this.
Darquier continued to write letters. On 25 August a Monsieur Lavigne asked permission to take in care Suzanne Janowski, the daughter of Jewish friends, but born in France. She was twelve and a half, in the Lande camp; her father, a distinguished war veteran, had already been deported. Lavigne was happy to pay for her keep and education. Darquier refused.
Rounded up by French police working with the préfets of each department, the Jews from the Vichy Zone were sent to Drancy in cattle trains, thirty Jews to a car, with only one bucket as a lavatory. The heat of mid-August intensified the squalor and the terrible smell of the stinking straw. Their first train went to Auschwitz from Drancy on 10 August, exactly as promised by Bousquet. Of that first thousand, 760 were gassed immediately, and one man survived at the end of the war.
August 1942 was the turning point. During the war years that followed, Pétain retained the veneration of some of his people. The responsibility for the sufferings of the French themselves, and of those whose sufferings they witnessed, was distributed, as is ever the way, between God and the Devil. Laval was the Devil, the cowboy in the black shirt. Pétain was, if not God, then his guardian angel. There is an echo of this in the last paragraph of the famous pastoral letter sent to the churches in his diocese by the Archbishop of Toulouse, to be read out from the pulpit on Sunday, 23 August 1942. Its title was “Human Dignity.”
My very dear Brothers,
There is a Christian morality, a human morality, which lays down duties and recognises rights. These rights and duties stem from the nature of man; they come from God. One can violate them … [but] no mortal has the power to do away with them.
Why is there no longer any right of asylum in our churches? …
In our diocese, moving scenes have occurred in the camps of Noé and Récédébou. The Jews are men; the Jewesses are women. The foreigners are men and women. One may not do anything one wishes to these men, to these women, to these fathers and mothers. They are part of the human race; they are our brothers, like so many others. A Christian cannot forget this.
France, beloved Fatherland; France, which bears in the consciences of all your children the tradition of respect for human dignity; chivalrous and generous France—I have no doubt that you are not responsible for these errors.
Yours devotedly, dear Brothers,
Jules Gérard Saliège46
Most of the priests in his diocese read out the letter, but in Cahors, Archbishop Chevrier would not permit it to be heard by his flock at the Cathédrale de St.-étienne. Two days later, when Bousquet began his massive round-ups in the Vichy Zone, four more bishops followed Saliège.47 His message became a clandestine document—published in the underground press, passed from hand to hand, and it “spread like wildfire in the south-west.” Clerical unease and messages from diverse charities spread the word to America.48
The news of the gas chambers broadcast on the BBC on 1 July 1942 was only the beginning of the subterranean knowledge throughout the world that sending Jews and others to these camps meant they were travelling “possibly to their deaths.”49 The actual word “death” was used all the time by those who were trying to save the children. It was used by their parents in the camps, in last letters home from the inmates of Drancy, and in so many other places—from pulpits, by word of mouth and in the underground newspapers, in the many reports and documents in which you read the words coupled together: “death” and “asphyxiés par les gaz toxiques.”
There were heroic priests. The Jesuit Father Pierre Chaillet in Lyon, and Father Victor Dillard in Vichy—whose death in Dachau is recorded by one of the rare plaques commemorating anything in that town—are just two examples. On 31 August 1942 Père Chaillet and his fellow résistants refused to give up the children they had hidden because, Chaillet explained, they would be “sent into exile and doubtless to their death.” In general, however, fewer than half the prelates in the Vichy Zone publicly objected to the deportation of the Jews, and none in the Occupied Zone.
In the camps of the south, charity workers of every religion and none had forced their way in to help in a “veritable battle for rescue,” but “in most places the local Catholic priests felt they could not intervene without special hierarchical permission and this could not be obtained in time.”50 Protestant consciences had been aroused for months by this time, led by the indefatigable Pastor Boegner, and their protests reached outrage during these summer months.51 With Jewish and other charities, with French townspeople and villagers and farmers, they worked to hide and save the children in a battle royal with Bousquet and his French police. Children were snatched from railway stations, hidden in convents and seminaries, in orphanages and other Church institutions. They were “adopted” by well-meaning French people, but many were tracked down and deported. None of them ever saw their parents again.
In Lyon, Charles Maurras greeted the deportation of the Jews with unalloyed joy. The circulation of his newspaper had halved, but his vitriol had doubled. “The main thing is to sort out—to judge, to condemn, to execute.” For Maurras the Resistance were “Jew-lovers.”52 He remained Pétain's man, acquiescing in any collaboration Pétain might like to undertake, but denounced all his former acolytes—Rebatet, Brasillach, Drieu la Rochelle and thousands of others—who had become “Paris traitors” and collabos with Germany. In fact he had only one true disciple left, Louis Darquier, who was interested in Germans, Hitler or fascism only if they were prepared to contribute to his welfare, or to assist him in ridding France of his imaginary monster, the Jew.
Throughout August Louis was still busy dictating letters and snapping at Vichy's heels. Bousquet was punctilious in keeping him informed of events. His deputy Jean Leguay wrote to Darquier on 3 August to tell him: “the trains of August 19, 21, 24 and 26 will be composed of the children.”53
On 26 August, the day the massive round-ups began in the south, Louis was in Vichy. There he met Raymond-Raoul Lambert, in charge of UGIF in the southern zone. To this Jewish leader—and future victim— surrounded as both men were by massive Jewish arrests, Darquier complained in lofty tones about Laval and his exclusion from these Bousquet round-ups. “What a strange regime,” wrote Lambert.54 What a strange man, who has only his victims to listen to his complaints.
In September, according to José de Lequerica, Louis Darquier explained the correctness of the French position towards the Jews to Cardinal Gerlier.55 This was unnecessary because although Gerlier adamantly protected Jewish children, and voiced his objection to racial hatred and persecution, his protests to Pétain always included avowals of his understanding of the “Jewish problem” and of loyalty to Pétain, whom he was “happy and proud” to serve.
Ambassadors in Vichy came to
Pétain to make objections, muted or otherwise, and many other voices were raised too. Pétain, who received something like two thousand letters a day anyway, was sent many from Jews in the camps. One little boy wrote: “Mama says there is nothing you can't do.” Others begged:
“Do not let them take my Mama. I am a little boy of ten, and today is my birthday. I am French and a Catholic, the parents of my mother were Jewish …”
“I am the mother of five children … my oldest fought under you at Verdun … my children have to wear the Yellow Star … have pity …”
“They have taken away my Mama, and I am alone and without any resource. I am fifteen years old …”
“my anguish …”
“Have pity …”
“I beg you …”
From every camp they wrote to him, for it was Laval, they believed, not Pétain, who must have arranged such terrible things. Outside the camps, his subjects wrote to him too: “It is FRANCE which is condemned and dishonoured…I am ashamed to be a Frenchman, to be a Christian, to be a man …” They hoped for “charity and justice,” they hoped in him, their “venerated Maréchal,” and they hoped in France, “eldest daughter of the Church.”56 Donald Lowrie of the international YMCA “appealed to Marshal Pétain in a special audience; representatives of the Quakers saw Laval. The result was nil.”
In Paris the cleverest collabo of them all, Robert Brasillach, wrote in Je Suis partout : “We must remove the Jews in a block, and not keep the young ones.”57 Within months the Catholic hierarchy had again fallen silent, reminded by an irritated Laval of the silence of Pope Pius XII on the matter. Any public protest against the deportation of the Jews was damaging to “the work of the Marshal.” Vichy then offered the French Church certain concessions, and at the beginning of 1943Pius XII sent messages. He was “favourably impressed,” he “warmly praised the work of the Marshal,” he welcomed signs of “the fortunate renewal of religious life in France.”58
By the end of August, still keeping up appearances as to who was in charge, Bousquet had formally informed Darquier that 11,184 Jews had been collected, of whom 6,340 had already been sent to Drancy; the rest were about to follow, and his police were pursuing escapees. Bousquet was immensely fond of figures and of his own achievements; at the invitation of Laval, he would proudly give the Vichy council of ministers “his description of the scene, the number of arrests” he had achieved.59 His letter to Darquier was a rare case of inaccuracy from Bousquet: in fact his final tally from the Vichy Zone for 1942 was only 7,100. 60
There were 12,664 from the Occupied Zone plus 7,100 from the Vichy Zone, which equals 19,764, and by no means all of these came into “deportable” categories—so the “deportable” categories had to be changed. Thousands of French Jews had gone to Auschwitz by this time, whether Vichy liked it or not. To get more Jews of any kind, Vichy now had to accept that Jewish blood flowed through French Jews, as it did through foreign and stateless ones. First, this involved the despatch of the children. When that was done, all of them—Vichy and the Germans— turned their attention to the naturalisation laws of France. Bousquet reported that, with Pétain and Laval's agreement, he was drafting a bill which would remove citizenship from all Jews naturalised since 1932.In October Carl Theo Zeitschel from the German embassy demanded a report from Darquier on the number of Jews available in the Vichy Zone, having read in the press that they numbered 2.7 million.
Although blessed by Cardinal Suhard, only seventeen thousand Frenchmen had volunteered to work in Germany since the announcement of the Relève in June 1942. By August Fritz Sauckel had issued a decree demanding forced labour throughout the occupied territories, and on 4 September Laval had given in. But he was fighting Sauckel every inch of the way; he had no time for Jewish children or Jews, and no time for anyone who fussed about them, archbishops or cardinals or Louis Darquier. He begged the Germans to request no more from him; Jews naturalised after 1932 would follow soon, but he could no longer supply “Jews in fixed number and at a set price ‘like something from a Uniprix shop. ’ ”61 It was this sort of response from Laval that hurled Louis Darquier into print in Die Judenfrage a month later.
On 20 July Eichmann had telephoned his decision that Jews unfit for work could be deported, children included, as soon as he could get sufficient transports, but that the children must be mixed with adults, so the French public would think they were being deported with their own parents. On 13 August the telegram came saying everything was ready for the children “to roll.” On the same day the Franco-German Deportation Committee, without Darquier, held a meeting at which Leguay, Dannecker and Röthke discussed how to implement these instructions.
This was to be Dannecker's last appearance. Knochen got rid of him by reporting his sex life to Berlin. Not only did Dannecker frequent nightclubs and brothels in “a scandalous fashion,” often, it seems, with Galien, it was also implied that he ran or owned some of them.62 The small number of Jews Dannecker offered to Berlin, instead of the fifty thousand Eichmann had first asked for, presumably made it easy for Knochen to get his way.
On 15 August the first trains set off. Small legs found it difficult to walk from the camps to the trains that took them to Drancy, or to climb up to the freight cars. French police lifted the babies and put them in. The descriptions of the departure of the children are almost as famous as the “Marseillaise”: “…Jacquot, a little five-year-old of whom I was particularly fond, started shouting for me: ‘I want to get down, I want to stay with Mademoiselle … ’ The door of the car was shut and bolted, but Jacquot pushed his hand through a gap between the two planks and continued to call for me, moving his fingers. The adjutant…hit him on the hand.”63
Trains poured into Drancy from almost every département. The French authorities could not agree as to who would supply what to the camp. The result was that by the time the children got there, the conditions were so terrible that even the German officials were shocked. The inmates were skeletal, some ill to death. When the children joined them their short time at Drancy was equally piteous, and is equally notorious. They were listed by numbers, with a question mark for the children too young to know or speak their names. After days and nights in the sealed boxcars that brought them to Drancy, on arrival they were covered with insects and they smelt; they had impetigo; many were covered with sores.
Some had mementos given them by their departing parents—photos, messages, jewellery—sewn to their clothes or in their little bundles. Sometimes they lost their bundles, and searched for them in the Drancy courtyard. They lost their brothers and sisters, if they had them, and some could not speak to be able to find them. Wooden dog tags round their necks solved this sometimes, but if the children could speak, “I'm Pierre's little brother” did not help.64
The bare rooms of Drancy were packed with children. Many of them were too small to navigate the stairs to the communal lavatory in the courtyard. There were buckets on the stairwells for them—always overflowing and dripping down the steps, as dysentery was added to diarrhoea. Rising and falling over this was a surge of whimpering and desperate crying. These are the children who believed they were going to some strange place to find their parents again, and they called this place “Pitchipoi.”
The French administration and police decided the composition of each convoy and made up the lists of the Jews to go on each train: those marked “D” were to be deported, those marked “R” to remain. But the ill, the blind and nursing mothers went; the trains had to be filled each time. Louis Darquier's absence from all this is underlined by a letter he received from Jean Leguay at the beginning of August, outlining the systems used.
It took three days to get to Auschwitz; French police accompanied the sealed freight cars, the Germans took over at the frontier. The first of these children went to Auschwitz with adults who were not their parents on 17 August, 530 of them under the age of twelve. Sometimes sisters and brothers went together; sometimes siblings were separated to await another train. The balan
ce of the thousand necessary in each train were foreign Jews from the Vichy Zone.
Before they left, men and women had their heads shaved, and the children did too. The day before they left Galien's men set up tables in the Drancy yard to search the bundles of the children, and took all the earrings, bracelets and brooches they found. So that the people living around Drancy would not notice, the children were woken early, to searchlights and the sound of the throbbing buses waiting for them in the yard. Shorn, many of them barefoot, the children were already beside themselves, and their sobbing meant they often could not hear as the police called out their names or numbers, the order to go. French police took some of the screaming children in their arms to the buses, and Ernst Heinrichsohn turned up at Drancy at 5 a.m. to make sure they left.
At le Bourget station the cattle trains which took them were sealed. For three days they lived in the dark, with no food, no water, and the usual bucket and straw. The seven trains that went off between 17 and 31 August took seven thousand Jews to Auschwitz, and the children made up about half this number. The youngest child sent in 1942 was Salomon Brojman, nine months old.
When Laval dined with Oberg on 2 September, his conversation about Darquier was part of his continuing attempts to get rid of him, and all the German authorities who were there or who learned about it afterwards understood it as such. When this was followed by Darquier's outburst in Die Judenfrage the embassy gave up on him; when he came to fisticuffs with Galien in October the SS did likewise. He had been in the job for four months, May to September 1942. Most of the 41,951 Jews sent to Auschwitz in 1942 went in those months, six and a half thousand of them Pétain's French Jews: 24,361 were gassed on arrival; the rest were put to work. In 1945, 784 men were still alive, and twenty-one women. In these four months almost half of all the Jewish deportees of France were despatched, in forty-three convoys. No trains went in October, and after a few in November they stopped for the winter.
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