Published: 26 November 2020
Last updated: 5 March 2024
SOME YEARS AGO, my best friend from childhood visited me for the first time in Israel. The son of a French Jewish mother who had moved to America early in World War II, he’d been raised Jewish and hated every aspect of it.
Completing our tour of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, I asked him whether any of his French family had perished in the Holocaust. He didn’t know but agreed to submit the question to the database.
The printout he received showed that not only had his grandfather, who had supposedly died of natural causes in Paris, been deported to Auschwitz, but so, too, had an uncle whom my friend never knew existed.
From the lobby, he called his mother. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?” he said, weeping. “Bad enough I had to live with it,” she replied. “Why should you?”
Her response was not unusual for French survivors. For the roughly one-half of French Jews who, in 1940, were not recent immigrants but long-established in the country, the trauma was twofold. Not only had their beloved homeland, the first to emancipate European Jews, betrayed them, but it had done so with unparalleled swiftness—a veritable volte-face.
It was the republic in which, on the eve of WWII, Leon Blum, Pierre Mendes-France, and other Jews could rise to the highest offices.
That enlightened France disappeared abruptly in June 1940 with the Nazi occupation of two-thirds of its territory and the instalment of a puppet regime under Marshal Philippe Pétain in the ostensibly free southern third.
FULL STORY It takes a village (Tablet)
Photo: Audrey Fleurot and Richard Sammel in A French Village (France TV)
