"Dark Thursday": 60 years ago

RENE GOLDMAN SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN

Thursday, July 16, 1942. Picture the dawn of a bright, hot summer day. How can one anticipate tragedy when the sky is so blue? Children, now on vacation from school, run out to play in the streets and courtyards, since they can no longer enjoy themselves in playgrounds and public parks, where signs have recently gone up barring admission to Jews. One month before, German occupation authorities had ordered the Jews to wear a yellow star marked "Juif" on their outer garment.

Yet, on that summer morning, beginning at four o'clock, 4,500 French policemen, organized into 900 squads, fanned out across Paris and suburbs, in a military-style operation code-named Vent Printanier (Spring Wind) against a defenceless population – the greatest manhunt in the history of Paris since 1572, when thousands of Protestants were rounded up and massacred by Catholic mobs unleashed by Queen Catherine of Medici. Day One of la Grande Raflé (the Great Roundup) had begun.

Targeted were 27,000 Jews who, between the two world wars, had immigrated to the "America of Europe" and who, for the most part, eked out meagre livings as tailors, leathersmiths or furriers in thousands of small workshops. The lists in the hands of the policemen were drawn up by the virulently anti-Semitic Darquier de Pellepoix, head of the Commissariat-Général for Jewish Affairs, established in June 1941 to co-ordinate anti-Jewish measures in the various services. Darquier had replaced in that post Xavier Vallat, who lectured young SS Sturmbahnfuhrer Danecker, saying: "I am an older anti-Semite than you are: I could be your father in these matters," yet was judged too "moderate."

Arrested on July 16 and the days that followed were 3,118 men, 5,919 women and 4,115 children (3,000 of them born in France): 13,152 people in total. In addition to all the police vans, 50 city busses were requisitioned to transport the Jews. Though the Germans had ordered the roundup, not a single German participated in it. Not having the manpower to do the dirty job, they relied on the French police, who could have refused or at least sabotaged the operation, yet carried it out zealously, going against German wishes in only one regard: that of arresting children below the age of 16. It was Prime Minister Pierre Laval who took the initiative of requesting from Adolf Eichmann permission to do just that, on the ground that it would be "inhuman" to separate children from their families! As a result, families with children below 16 were taken to the suburban concentration camp of Drancy, the "antechamber of death" from where the Auschwitz-bound cattle-car trains left.

Families with infants and young children were jam-packed for seven days into the Vel d'Hiv, the Winter Circus, in conditions that defy description: suffocating heat, overwhelming stench due to plugged latrines, scanty distribution of food and drink, and almost no medical attention. Many went mad, many died. From the Winter Circus they were transported to the internment camps of Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, where the families were separated in any case, the adults being redirected to Auschwitz via Drancy first, and the children, some too little to even know their names, being carried days later, utterly alone in their distress, in cattle-car trains along the same harrowing itinerary of death. Almost none of the children arrested during the Grande Raflé survived.

That 13,848 Jews escaped arrest was due to the fact that, thanks to leaks from the prefecture of police, the Jewish underground had wind of what was coming and warned as many people as could be reached. The Jewish communist network, Solidarité, disseminated a leaflet that called on all Jews to not stay at home, to go into hiding and, above all, to hide the children among sympathetic French people. Indeed, many were sympathetic and proferred a helping hand.

There had been raflés before, the first one taking place on May 14, 1941. These, however, were limited in scope and staged almost solely for the purpose of rounding up Jewish men for forced labor in some of the internment camps of France's own Gulag archipelago. On July 16, 1942, for the first time, women and children were rounded up as well. That date marked a turning point, in more ways than one, in the unfolding of the so-called Final Solution in France.

Before the Grande Raflé

Beginning on May 10, 1940, the Germans overran Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. Within a month, the French army, the largest in Europe, but unprepared and demoralized, was thoroughly routed. On June 14, the Wehrmacht paraded down Paris's grand avenue of the Champs-Elysées The humiliating defeat, soon to be blamed on Communists, Jews, Free Masons and the Popular Front government of 1936, headed by the Socialist party leader Leon Blum, a Jew, resulted in the collapse of the Third Republic. Prime Minister Paul Reynaud resigned and President Albert Lebrun asked the 84-year-old marshal Philippe Petain, revered for having led the French forces to victory at Verdun during the First World War, to form a government and sue for peace.

On June 22, Hitler summoned Petain to Rethondes where, in the very railway car in which the German capitulation was signed in 1918, an armistice was concluded, by virtue of which France was partitioned into an occupied zone in the north and along the Atlantic coast, and a "free" or non-occupied zone in the south. The heavily guarded demarcation line between the two zones could only be crossed with special permits.

Notwithstanding these disabilities, France enjoyed a privileged status in Europe's New Order. Apart from its obligations to provide Germany with agricultural and industrial supplies, as well as laborers, the French government, which now moved from Bordeaux to Vichy in the free zone, retained sovereignty over internal affairs in both zones.

On July 10, the National Assembly elected in 1936 granted, by an overwhelming majority, full powers to Petain. The latter then abolished the French Republic, with its universalistic logo of "liberty, equality, fraternity" and created in its place the état Français, with its parochial, fascist-type logo of "work, family, fatherland," emblematic of his "national revolution."

On Sept. 27, Adolf Hitler ordered the French to take a census of the Jewish population. A few days later, the Vichy government enacted a body of legislation entitled Statute of the Jews. A Jew was defined as any person who had at least three grandparents, or two grandparents and a spouse of the Jewish "race." Racial in its conception, the French definition was more sweeping than the German one, which was based on the religious affiliation of grandparents. And yet, it met with virtually no opposition from lawyers and judges.

The Jews were divided into two categories: those who held French citizenship, who were under the "protection" of the government, and foreign Jews, who were mostly immigrants from eastern Europe who had flocked to France by the thousands after the First World War. The latter group, particularly recent refugees in the free zone, were liable to internment at the discretion of regional prefects and were frequently handed over to the Germans in the north. Vichy also created a Commissariat-Général for Jewish Affairs to co-ordinate anti-Jewish measures in all government services. In June 1941, a second statute excluded Jews from government positions, the armed forces and the professions; it also rolled back naturalizations granted in the 1930s.

Divisions in community

The Jews of France did not constitute a single community. Yet, in November 1941, the many Jewish organizations – with the exception of the Consistoire Israelite de France, the central religious authority headed by the "grand-rabbin" – were forced to combine as the UGIF (Union Générale des Israelites de France) under the supervision of the General Commissariat and SS Sturmbahnfuhrer Danecker.

Since they were emancipated in 1791, the Jews of France had never experienced legal discrimination: there were no ghettos and no barriers to social advancement and assimilation. There was anti-Semitism, but it never led to pogroms. Even the Dreyfus Affair at the turn of the 20th century had not shaken the trust that the Jews held for France, for justice had at the end prevailed and Dreyfus was rehabilitated.

Even at the time of the Grand Raflé, the Jews trusted that the French government, notwithstanding its anti-Semitic nature, would cushion them against the full violence of the Germans. Their trust was cruelly betrayed. Even though persecution focused on "foreign" Jews, Vichy did not protest when, in December 1942, the Germans, snubbing French sovereignty, arrested 745 Jewish professionals, all French, all members of the social elite of Paris, and transported them to the camp of Royallieu near Compiegne, and from there to Auschwitz.

Vichy-German alliance

The fate of my parents stands as an example illustrating the collaboration between Vichy and the Germans. In the summer of 1942, we fled Belgium and managed to cross the occupied zone and the line of demarcation undetected. We were, however, found by the French police in the southern zone, where Vichy exercised sovereignty unhampered by the Germans.

On Aug. 26, a roundup comparable to the one staged in Paris on the order of the Germans, netted thousands of "stateless Jews," who were transported into the hands of the Germans and who followed the tragically familiar route to Drancy and Auschwitz. Fortunately, many were able to go into hiding.

My parents and I had been assigned to residence in a requisitioned hotel of Lons-le-Saunier. Two weeks later, the police came to arrest us and other refugees from Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg. My father escaped, my mother and I were caught; my mother's sister, who was a French citizen, arrived at the railway station at the very moment we were being loaded onto a train bound for Rivesaltes, one of a series of ghastly internment camps in the Pyrenees, in which 3,000 Jews had died from disease, malnutration, etc. My aunt managed to wrest me from the clutches of the police, but my mother was, a week after her arrival at Rivesaltes, transported with 650 others back north, this time all the way to Drancy, from where convoy number 33 took them to Auschwitz.

In November, in the wake of the Allied landing in North Africa, the Germans occupied the southern zone of France as well. At the same time, the Italians occupied the Alpine regions and Nice. Curiously enough, the Italian occupation zone, which lasted eight months, until the overthrow of Benito Mussolini, was the only part of France where the Jews felt safe. Notwithstanding Mussolini's anti-Semitic laws, the Italian army protected Jewish refugees and prevented the French police from arresting them. With the Italians gone, there was no safety anywhere. In August 1944, one month before the liberation of Lyon, my father, who was a member of the Jewish resistance underground, was caught by the police and handed over to the Germans. He was on the last train that left France for the death camps.

In the 1990s, President Jacques Chirac acknowledged that Vichy, contrary to the myth current until then, did represent France. He added that France did, in those terrible years, "commit the irreparable." Were he to look at his reflection in a mirror, Chirac would have to acknowledge that under his presidency France is, in 2002, again "committing the irreparable" by doing nothing to stop a tidal wave of anti-Semitic outrages.

Rene Goldman is professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia.

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