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PDF FormatRoundups of Jews in preparation for transport to the death camps in Poland aroused feelings of revulsion in the French public, and led to empathy with the Jews and even a feeling of solidarity with them—which in turn brought about the first significant breach in the support enjoyed by the Vichy government, in the spring and summer of 1942. At that time, the bishop of Toulouse, Monseigneur Saliege, issued a diocesan letter denouncing the deportations and calling upon believing Catholics to come to the Jews’ aid. Other bishops, such as Pierre Gerlier of Lyons, who was an enthusiastic supporter of Vichy policies, expressed similar sentiments, though less forcefully. It should be noted that neither Saliege nor the other bishops and archbishops opposed the Vichy regime, and they saw it as the legitimate government of France. (Saliege was later honored by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust museum, which declared him a “righteous gentile” and planted a tree in his memory at the Avenue of the Righteous among the Nations, even though he was not among the opponents of Vichy.) And as criticism of the Nazis and of Vichy’s collaboration with them grew, so did the willingness among the French to help the Jews.
The Vichy government opposed the arrest and deportation by the Germans of Jews who held French citizenship. At the same time, Jews in France who were not citizens, numbering about 150,000, were left to the mercy of the Nazis; the job of arresting them and handing them over to the Nazis was given to the Vichy police. The Nazis, for their part, pressed for the wholesale cancellation of French citizenship for all Jews, which would have made it possible to deport them en masse to the death camps—but the Vichy government forcefully rejected this demand. Among opponents of this demand was Pierre Laval, who rebuffed pressure from Germany, and from anti-Semites within the French government and the circles of collaborators. The most Laval was willing to do was to set up a committee that would examine all the cases of naturalization of foreigners (not only Jews) that had been approved since the passage of a liberal naturalization law in 1927, and determine whether there were people who had been granted citizenship improperly. Of the twenty thousand cases that were reviewed, three thousand Jews were found to have been improperly naturalized; they lost their citizenship and were left to the bitter fate that awaited the deportees.
Even after the German army marched into the previously unoccupied zone in November 1942, in response to the invasion by the western Allies of Morocco and Algeria, the Vichy government maintained some independence in its policy concerning the Jews, and continued its opposition to the yellow star and the deportation of Jewish citizens. Even with all of France under occupation, Germany continued declaring itself to be bound by the armistice agreement, and therefore continued to relate to the Vichy government as the official representative of a sovereign France. The Nazis were not interested in driving Petain and his followers to all-out opposition to the occupation, or in precipitating Petain’s flight to North Africa. Thus, even at this juncture, they did not ignore the positions of the Vichy authorities, and certainly did not institute the kind of regime that they imposed in other occupied countries, particularly in Eastern Europe.
The Jews’ response to what was taking place around them varied widely. It should be recalled that fully half of the 300,000 Jewish residents of prewar France were non-citizens. For the most part, these were immigrants from Eastern Europe and refugees from the conquered lands of the Third Reich; in addition to their lingual and cultural diversity, these Jews were involved in a wide range of professional occupations, and bore diverse political and religious affiliations. Nor was French Jewry itself homogeneous. It included fully assimilated Jews whose Jewish origin was not known to anyone, as well as proud Jews who made no secret of their heritage.
Of the assimilated Jews, most of whom had been firmly rooted in French life for generations, some ignored the order to register as Jews, continued to live and act as Frenchmen, and in some cases even succeeded in holding on to their government posts. Others supported the Jewish mutual-aid organizations and extended a hand to foreign Jews in their midst. Such support agencies enjoyed the aegis of the French Communist Party, the Bund, and the Zionists, organized financial assistance, found housing for homeless deportees, and provided health services. Poznanski describes a meeting of Jewish volunteers that took place in Paris on June 15, 1940:
Those members of the French Federation of Jewish Societies who had not left Paris convened in order to decide what steps should be taken. Most were well-known political activists who had gained renown before the war in the movements of the Jewish-Zionist Left (Poalei Tzion and Hashomer Hatza’ir) and the non-Zionist Left (the Bund). Cooperation in the area of welfare was understood as a direct continuation of the work that had been done earlier by the social aid organization founded by Jewish immigrants in 1930… but now they wasted no time in extending their activity to all areas of welfare assistance.
These volunteers, who united as the Amelot Committee, “set up and ran… four soup kitchens that served an average of 1,500 meals daily… More than a third of the meals were distributed for free… Health services included free clinic visits…, distribution of medicine, and the creation of a center for the distribution of clothing.” Perhaps most importantly, they also smuggled Jews to the unoccupied south and published underground periodicals which served as a source of information and encouragement for many Jews.
Poznanski depicts such heroic actions of organizations and individuals in detail, with compassion and understanding. In researching To Be a Jew in France, Poznanski left no stone unturned, poring through government and personal archives, memoirs, personal diaries, and oral testimonies, in order to present a panoramic view of the daily trials of the Jews of France, and of the ways in which they grappled with their predicament. In this history, it is not the substantial role played by Jews in the French Resistance movements that takes center stage, but rather the “history of everyday life” that is currently popular among historians studying Central and Western Europe under Nazi occupation. Poznanski offers numerous detailed accounts of Jews who were suddenly stripped of their livelihood, security, and rights as Frenchmen, in the very country that had been the first to grant its Jews emancipation a century and a half earlier. Jewish merchants whose businesses were banned were suddenly left without an income at a time of increasing unemployment, and were forced to earn their living through whatever backbreaking manual labor they could find. Civil servants, judges, and lecturers who had lost their jobs tried to make do by teaching privately or in schools, or by finding a new profession. The many others who simply could not find a means of support were able to avoid starvation through the assistance of the local community’s mutual-aid organizations or those of the Zionists, Communists, or Bundists.
Particularly moving are the excerpts from the letters to Petain and his government by members of the veteran assimilated families, in which they related the history of their families’ integration into French life, and their ancestors’ contribution to France’s defense dating from the Napoleonic wars to the present. As Poznanski concludes:
The fate of most of the Jews resembled that of George Ascoli, a professor at the Sorbonne who won five medals in World War I, commanded a battalion in 1940, and was a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany. Upon his return to Paris, however, he learned that he had been relieved of all his duties—or like Antoine Sciama, a student in the Polytechnic School whose grandfather had participated in the construction of the Suez Canal and whose great-grandfather, who had fought in Napoleon’s army, lost his leg to frostbite in the battle of Berezina—but none of this mattered when, upon completing his studies, he was not accepted for any position at all.
There were even some Jews who despaired of receiving special permission to continue in their positions in the civil service or the universities (such permission was given, for example, to the renowned historian Marc Bloch), and angrily returned to Petain the medals they or their fathers had earned for valor in defense of the French homeland.
