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January 3, 2003
Jews, persecution and resistance
Reactions by religious groups to the Shoah ranged from indifference
to hazardous, life-saving activities.
RENÉ GOLDMAN SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN
This is the second article in a series on France, 60 years ago.
The first article appeared in the Bulletin Sept. 6, 2002.
Dark Thursday" of July 16, 1942, in Paris, was a pivotal event
in the tragedy of French Jewry. For the first time, entire families,
including children, the elderly and the infirm, were rounded up
and transported to extermination camps, under the guise of "resettlement
in the east." The "Final Solution" had come to France.
Until then, it had simply been inconceivable that brutality such
as that met by the Jews of Eastern Europe could happen in the West,
particularly in a country whose government retained internal sovereignty
and where the public conduct of German soldiery was disciplined
and relatively correct.
The trust of the Jews, who expected that the French government,
notwithstanding its anti-Semitism, would shield them from the Germans,
was betrayed. Not all of the Jews rounded up on July 16 were "foreign."
Of the 4,051 children between the ages of two and 16, some 3,000
were born in France. But, instead of being protected as French citizens,
the government had them arrested along with their parents. The realization
that they were destined to meet the same fate as their brethren
in the east was slow in coming. It was not until October that rumors
of gassing reached the Jewish underground press.
Meanwhile, on Aug. 25, the day before the massive round-up of Jewish
refugees scheduled by Vichy for the Unoccupied Zone, Chief Rabbi
Joseph Kaplan addressed in the name of the Consistoire Israelite
de France a strongly worded protest letter to Marshal Philippe Pétain,
informing him that it was not to "resettlement" that the
Jews were being transported from Drancy, but to "methodical
and pitiless extermination." Copies of that letter were sent
to prominent Christian leaders and the papal nuncio, Mgr. Valerio
Valeri, who dismissed as "rather tepid" another plea addressed
to Pétain by Emmanuel Cardinal Suhard, Archbishop of Paris,
that he respect of "the laws of humanity."
Much firmer, however, were the protests of Pierre Cardinal Gerlier,
Archbishop of Lyon and primate of France, and especially of Jules-Géraud
Cardinal Saliège, the saintly Archbishop of Toulouse. The
pastoral letter, which Saliège ordered read from the pulpit
on Sunday mass in all the churches of the Southwest, contained the
impassionate words: "That children, women, men, fathers and
mothers, should be treated like vile cattle, that members of the
same family should be separated and embarked for an unknown destination:
it is the privilege of our times to witness this sad spectacle....
The Jews are men and women.... Not everything is permissible against
them. They are part of humankind. They are our brothers like so
many others."
In vain did the authorities attempt to prevent the dissemination
and reading of that pastoral letter. Vichy asked Pope Pius XII to
retire Saliège but, to his credit, the latter refused. When
88 Jewish children in Lyon were wrested from the police and hidden
in a church safe house, Gerlier rejected the demands of the prefect
that they be returned.
Until the summer of 1942, the Catholic church had, by and large,
approved of the anti-Semitic laws on the grounds that the Jews,
particularly the immigrants, constituted a threat to the state because
of their alleged susceptibility to communist indoctrination. Only
a handful of lower clergy and monks, as well as scholars, dared
to oppose Vichy. One of them was Father Dillard, vicar of the very
church attended by Pétain and other dignitaries of the regime.
During Sunday mass on June 14 (one month before "la Grande
Rafle") he exhorted the faithful to pray for the Jews, who
were compelled to wear the yellow star, and for all those detained
in camps in France. Dillard's audacity earned him deportation to
Dachau, where he perished.
Protestant leaders condemned Vichy's "Statute of the Jews"
from the beginning. As early as March 1941, pastor Marc Boegner,
president of the Reformed Church of France, protested to Pétain
against the inhumanity of the racial laws. At the same time, he
addressed to Chief Rabbi Isaie Schwartz a letter in which he underlined
the "unbreakable spiritual bond which unites Protestants and
Jews." The activity of Pastor Andre Trocme, spiritual leader
of the Protestant population of Chambon-sur-Lignon on the Cevennes
plateau, was an edifying manifestation of that bond. Less known
are the activities of CIMADE, a Protestant network, which organized
escapes from internment camps and smuggled children into Spain and
Switzerland.
A noticeable change was also taking place in the attitudes of the
population, generally too preoccupied with procuring food and obtaining
the return of husbands held in POW camps and sons drafted for compulsory
labor in Germany to pay much attention to the Jews. Many were now
sickened by the sight of some Frenchmen: not merely the thugs of
the fascist militia and the Parti Populaire Français of Marcel
Deat and Jacques Doriot, but even regular policemen, roughing up
helpless people, robbing them of their possessions, tearing children
away from their parents, behaving with a brutality that they thought
only the Germans capable of. Even people "normally" anti-Semitic
could not bear to see Jews treated so abominably. Such was the case
of the farmer's wife who called me "a dirty little Jew,"
but nevertheless sheltered me through the summer of 1944. The move
of public opinion away from the regime opened a field of opportunity
not only for righteous gentiles but, just as importantly, for Jews
to rush into action to save Jewish lives, notably by hiding children.
This task was assumed in a spirit of kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh
(each Jew is responsible for every Jew) by all resistance groups:
the Oeuvre de Secours Aux Enfants (Children's Welfare Society)
(OSE); the MOI communist underground in Paris, Lyon, Grenoble and
Toulouse; the Jewish Boy Scouts (EIF); and the Zionist "Jewish
army" operating in the hilly areas of the Cevennes and Tarn
and whose most spectacular action was the capture of a German armored
train with more than 1,000 soldiers and officers in August 1944.
The notion of "resistance" needs to be understood as much
more than fighting with weapons, an option not available for most
Jews. To do everything to survive in opposition to an enemy determined
to make the world "Judenrein," by going into hiding, was
already an act of resistance.
The first Jewish resistance organization was a group of professionals
and social activists hailing from the OSE, the Bund and Poalei Zion
who, two days after the German entry into Paris on June 14, 1940,
pooled their facilities, which included cantines, a medical dispensary,
a children's vacation colony, etc. Their seat was the fortuitous
number 36 on Amelot Street, which caused them to become known as
the Amelot committee. That committee dispensed considerable amounts
of material assistance to destitute Jews, besides organizing cultural
activities, Passover seders and conferences. Its cantines, which
served more than 1,000 low-cost or free meals daily, served as venues
for socializing. The committee skilfully manipulated every legal
opportunity to maintain effective independence from the Judenrat-like
Union générale des israélites de France (UGIF)
and to use its welfare activities as a cover for illegal activities,
such as the fabrication of false identity papers, the transmission
of messages from internees to their families, the hiding of as many
as 1,000 Jewish children with gentile families and institutions.
Its directors, I. Jakubowicz and David Rapaport, were veritable
rocks of support to the distraught people, who sought their help
and counsel at all times. Rapaport, who came to be known as the
"Zaddik," was arrested in 1944 and perished.
At a secret meeting held on Sept. 1, 1940, nine Jewish communists
founded Solidarité, which grew into a well-structured urban
underground movement that operated in Paris, Lyon and other cities.
Its illegal printing shops produced leaflets, false ID cards and
the Yiddish newspaper Unzer Vort. Like Jewish publications
of other orientations, these did much to prevent the Jewish population
from sinking into confusion and despair. The timely information
that they disseminated enabled more than half of the Jews targeted
for arrest on July 16 to go into hiding before the police arrived,
thus dealing a serious blow to the operation. Of the 27,391 Jews
on the police lists, 12,884, the majority being women and children,
fell into the net. Solidarité also gave financial and material
assistance to the needy, and kidnapped children from the shelters
of the UGIF, from where, occasionally, extra victims were extracted
to fill up Auschwitz-bound convoys.
Next week: Stories of resistance and salvation.
René Goldman is professor emeritus at the University
of British Columbia.
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