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January 10, 2003
Aiding resistance movement
The Jews of France contributed greatly to the struggle against
Nazism.
RENÉ GOLDMAN SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN
This is the final article in a series on France, 60 years ago.
The first article in the series appeared in the Bulletin Sept.
6. Part 1 of this article appeared Jan. 3.
A particularly sensational operation was that conducted on Feb.
16, 1943, when a group of Jewish women led by my godmother, Sophie
Schwartz-Micnik of Solidarité, and Protestant women led by
Susanne Spaak, presented themselves at three Union générale
des israélites de France (UGIF) shelters as aunts, grandmothers,
etc., and took 60 children for an "afternoon's outing."
These children were then hidden in a Protestant clinic run by pastor
Paul Vergara and, in the days following, smuggled out of Paris in
small groups, to be placed with mainly rural families.
Solidarité was integrated in the Jewish section of Main d'oeuvre
immigré (MOI), a network created by the French Communist
party even before the war to mobilize immigrant workers. The network
was divided into ethnic sections: Polish, Romanian, Armenian, Jewish,
etc. Under the umbrella of the MOI were urban guerrilla units. More
than half of these fighters were Jews, mostly young people, some
mere teenagers, anxious to fight and avenge their parents and siblings.
The political leader of the Jewish section, Adam Rayski (the still
active great historian of the Jewish resistance), and its military
leader, Boris Holban, answered to Louis Gronowski (also a Jew),
overall co-ordinator of the MOI, and the leadership of the French
Communist party. The latter often recklessly exposed Jewish fighters
to dangerous operations, such as attacks on German soldiers, that
had little to do with protecting Jews.
Some denunciators of Jews were executed, but no attacks were conducted
against French policemen engaged in arresting Jews; no trains carrying
Jews to Germany were derailed. The MOI conducted industrial sabotage
in workshops where furs, gloves and winter clothing were manufactured
for the Wehrmacht. Its fighters staged many a spectacular coup,
such as the execution of the deputy commissar-general for Jewish
affairs in Lyon, and the shooting to death in broad daylight in
Paris, of Julius Ritter, Himmler's assistant for rounding up manpower
across Europe. The latter action was carried out by 18-year-old
Marcel Rayman and his companion, the Armenian poet Missak Manoukian.
Both were eventually caught, savagely tortured by the Gestapo and
murdered along with many others, after the Gestapo, assisted by
the Special Brigades of the French police, managed in late 1943
to destroy the entire MOI underground in Paris, thanks to the obstinacy
of Communist party boss Jacques Duclos, who refused to allow Jewish
cadres to flee to Lyon.
An outstanding example of Jews saving Jews was that of the Organisation
secours des enfants (OSE) leader, the engineer Georges Garel (Garfinkel),
who joined forces with Henri Glasberg, a Catholic priest of Jewish
origin. Together they scouted every region in search of helping
hands and hiding places, and organized teams of dedicated young
women social workers to chaperon the children to their hiding places,
visit them regularly to ensure that they were not mistreated, and
pay the host families who asked for it. Garel received the all-out
support of Jules Géraud Cardinal Saliège, Archbishop
of Toulouse, and Pierre Cardinal Theas, Bishop of Montauban, who
had all the Catholic institutions of the southwest open their doors
to Jewish children; they also covered the fabrication of false ID
cards for adults.
Thus came into existence the "Garel Circuit," along which
so many were saved, including myself. After the loss of my mother,
I lived for a short time in one of the seven children's homes (Chateau
de Masgelier), set up by the OSE in the still-unoccupied southern
zone; from there I was taken with others to Vendoeuvres, a small
village of the Chateauroux region and, after the occupation of the
south, to a Catholic convent school.
Ensuring that the memory of the greatest tragedy in Jewish history
not be lost was the form of resistance chosen by Rabbi Isaac Schneerson
(cousin of the Lubavitcher Rebbe), who disapproved of armed struggle.
He gathered the largest possible collection of documents on the
fate of the Jews of France and, at a secret meeting of some 40 representatives
of various Jewish organizations held in Grenoble on April 28, 1943,
founded the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine. Today,
it is one of the major research institutes on the Shoah, and houses
in its seat in Paris a sanctuary to the Jewish martyrs.
As for the assimilated French Jews who joined the resistance movement,
they regarded their action as part of the struggle of the French
nation against the German occupation and did not see it as having
any specific Jewish character. This was notably the case with patriotic
intellectuals like sociologists Georges Friedmann and Raymond Aron;
lawyer Lucien Vidal-Nacquet; distinguished jurist René Cassin,
president of the Alliance israelite universelle and future drafter
of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights promulgated by the
United Nations; and historian Marc Bloch, who was tortured to death
by Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyon." In the south,
Jewish resistance continued unabated until Liberation.
Women played a leading role in Lyon, especially in 1944, at a time
when men rarely ventured out, because of the "physionomists"
of the militia who roamed the streets and ordered Jewish-looking
men to lower their trousers for "verification." My father,
Wolf Goldman, was a member of the Lyon MOI underground. He was caught
one month before liberation by agents of the Special Forces, handed
over to the Gestapo, and left France on the very last convoy bound
for Auschwitz.
The instances enumerated above do by no means exhaust the list of
the amazing contributions made by the Jews of France to the struggle
against Nazism and the liberation of the country. Suffice it to
point out that when, after the war, Gen. Charles De Gaulle created
the order of the Compagnons de la Libération, of the 1,041
recipients of the decoration, 51, or five per cent, were Jews. At
the time, the Jews represented only 0.75 per cent of the population
of France.
Another result of the combat, which elicited the participation of
so many Jews belonging to so many different organizations and political
orientations, was that a degree of unity was fostered among them.
The old antagonisms softened. The Conseil représentatif des
institutions juives de France, a broadly representative council,
which eliminated the distinction between native and immigrant Jews,
and federates religious and secular Jews, Ashkenazim and Sephardim,
was founded in Lyon in January 1944 and remains active to this day.
René Goldman is professor emeritus at the University
of British Columbia.
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