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PDF FormatIn the last part of the book, Poznanski tackles the question of how it came about that three-quarters of the Jews who lived in France during the war survived the Nazi onslaught. Of the country’s 300,000 Jews, only about 75,000 were sent to the death camps; of these deportees, about 50,000 were foreign nationals. In other words, even among the 150,000 Jewish non-citizens in France, whom the Nazis were free to hunt at will, about two-thirds survived.
Poznanski attributes the survival of the majority of French Jewry to the slowness with which the Germans implemented their genocidal policies; the paucity of resources they dedicated to the transport of Jews to Eastern Europe; the ability of the Jews, prior to November 1942, to flee to the unoccupied south; the possibility of escaping after November 1942 to the part of the country in the southeast that was controlled by the Italians, who not only did not share the Nazis’ murderous designs but even protected the Jews; and the passive resistance of the majority of Frenchmen to the Nazi policy of deportation and murder. This opposition intensified after the occupation of the south in November 1942, and after the imposition in February 1943 of mandatory registration for labor in Germany. Basing herself mostly on the conclusions of earlier scholars, Poznanski argues that if France had not been liberated between June and November of 1944, the Germans would have succeeded in making up for lost time in deporting France’s Jews. “The process of destruction was cut short by the liberation of territories by the Allies,” she writes. “Had that happened several months later, the results might have been completely different.”
This account, even though all its elements are true, falls short. It does not explain, for example, why the Germans took so long in implementing their murderous policies in France, and why they allocated so few resources for the transports in comparison with, say, Holland—where the Nazis succeeded in killing no fewer than 85 percent of the country’s Jews. Moreover, Poznanski’s explanation glosses over the specific question of the Jewish foreign nationals. These Jews were utterly abandoned by the Vichy authorities, and the government’s security apparatus (the police and, especially, the milice) were supposed to spare no expense in capturing Jewish non-citizens and handing them over to the Nazis.
A better explanation may be found if we take a look at the extensive scholarly literature that has appeared in recent years concerning the functioning of Petain’s government, and in particular the question of whether his course of action was justified. These works teach that many Frenchmen did not fully carry out the orders they were given concerning the Jews, and even ignored them or followed them for the sake of appearance alone after having warned the Jews of what awaited them. And there were others who simply played both sides during the entire Vichy period, acting alternately as loyal officials and as supporters of the French Resistance, Spanish refugees, anti-Nazi Germans, and persecuted Jews. Even the French war hero Jean Moulin played this sort of dual role during the first year of the Vichy regime, and continued to serve as a regional prefect. Only later did he leave his position, join de Gaulle’s liberation movement in London, and then return to southern France in order to establish the National Council of the Resistance; there he remained until the Nazis captured him and tortured him to death in June 1943.
The active role played by the French in thwarting German intentions to annihilate the Jews was amply illustrated in one of the largest rescue operations undertaken during the entire war: The smuggling of about ten thousand Jewish children from the occupied north to villages in the unoccupied south. The operation’s success required substantial organization by the Jews, extensive aid from the French resistance movements, and, above all, thousands of families of French farmers who were willing to provide refuge for these children along the way. Had all these factors not been in place, the children would not, in all likelihood, have been saved.
A further example of French efforts on behalf of the Jews is the behavior of the Paris police during the massive roundup of Jewish non-citizens on the night of July 16, 1942. The French police, aided by volunteers from the ranks of the French Nazi organizations, surrounded the Jewish neighborhoods and sought to carry out arrests according to detailed registration lists of Jewish foreign nationals. Yet the French police succeeded in arresting only about half the people on the lists—thanks to sympathizers at the Paris police headquarters who tipped off the Jews and thereby enabled those who were capable of escaping to do so in advance of the roundup, to make it to hiding places, and from there to go on to the unoccupied south.
The dual character of the Paris police was also expressed in its struggle against the French underground organizations. The police employed two main divisions in its search for Jews and Resistance members: The general intelligence service and the Special Brigades. Agents of the former were none too enthusiastic about carrying out their orders, and many of them actively aided the underground or were even members of its organizations; the tip-offs to Jews usually came from their ranks. The members of the Special Brigades, on the other hand, usually supported collaboration with the Germans and were far more diligent in their efforts to capture Resistance members and Jews.
Poznanski is correct in positing that these cases reflect more on French society as a whole than on the French government at Vichy. But is it conceivable that the prefects and subprefects, under whose command the police officers, detectives, and informers everywhere served, were unaware of what was going on? Initial studies based on the archives of the prefects and subprefects show that many of them indeed knew. They generally turned a blind eye for various reasons: Some as part of the French national resistance effort to the Nazis and their actions, others out of compassion for the Jews, and still others out of a cynical desire to hedge their bets by ensuring that they would be remembered for their righteous conduct in the reckoning that would take place after the liberation.
Beyond the ambivalent relations of the non-Jewish citizens of France and of the French government towards the Jews, an additional factor also contributed to their rescue, one that was an inherent part of German policy on the administration of France. German rule in France did not resemble German rule in Poland. Giving assistance to Jews or fomenting labor unrest—such as the coal miners’ strike in the occupied north in May 1941—was not automatically punished by death. In France it was possible to bring production to a halt in a segment of the economy essential to the German war effort, such as the coal industry, to take part in rescue operations, or to flout the conqueror’s honor by hanging a yellow star on the collars of dogs, without being executed on the spot or sent to the concentration camps. In many instances, such ׂcriminals׃ were tried and punished by the French courts of Vichy, but the sentences that were imposed were not unbearably harsh. In other words, the singular nature of German rule in France, which so differed from the character of Nazi occupation in most other countries, should be added to the list of factors that facilitated the rescue of the majority of French Jewry. Poznanski, however, does not give it the weight it deserves.
More striking in its absence from the book, however, is any discussion of the objective, if unintentional, role of buffer that the Vichy government played between the German occupier and the Jews. It is commonly held, for example, that the collaboration of King Boris of Bulgaria with the Germans staved off direct occupation and enabled the rescue of the majority of that country’s Jews. Denmark is praised for the protection of its Jews, but this too was due in no small measure to the fact that the Danish government operated under the aegis of a German protectorate, and was itself the product of a certain measure of collaboration with Germany. This is true as well with respect to the quasi-fascists Miklosh Horthy and Ion Antonescu in Hungary and Romania. The majority of Romania’s Jews survived because they were not under direct German rule, even if they did suffer brutal treatment at the hands of the anti-Semitic Romanian government. In Hungary, Horthy limited himself to practicing various forms of discrimination against the Jews and to limiting their freedoms, whereas the large-scale murder began only in the spring of 1944, when the Germans occupied Hungary, installed a government of direct occupation, and began the accelerated deportation of its Jews to Auschwitz. The fact that half of Hungary’s Jews survived is a direct result of the delay in the start of the mass-murder operation, coupled with the fact that in August of that year, the Germans had to stop it, as the Red Army stood at the gates of Hungary, and the German military was forced to evacuate.
Bearing in mind the limitations of such a parallel, and taking into account the sensitivity required by anyone making this sort of claim, it is nevertheless reasonable to conclude that what has often been said of Jewish survival in Denmark, Hungary, and Romania before the occupation of these countries is also true, to a certain degree, of French Jewry. Clearly such a conclusion should never be voiced without due consideration of its implications, and it is of utmost importance that my words be understood in context. I am keenly aware that from the standpoint of French national honor and the rehabilitation of the country, and especially from the overall perspective of the war against Nazi Germany, right was on the side of de Gaulle and not Petain. The continuation of the war in June 1940 by France, based in its empire in northern and central Africa, and the dedication of the French navy, second in size only to Great Britain’s, would have contributed greatly to the British war effort. It should not be forgotten that during the heroic, perilous year between June 1940 and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, and even until the declaration of war by Germany against the United States in December 1941, Britain stood alone against the Germans. The French navy, rather than being destroyed by the British in Algeria in July 1940, or remaining idly at anchor in the port of Toulon under the terms of the armistice agreement, could have supported the British navy in the immensely important task of defending the British isles and guarding the crucial supply routes from the United States across the Atlantic. The decision by Petain to stop hostilities and accept an armistice, a decision that enjoyed the support of the decisive majority of the French people and its elites, was nothing short of disgraceful. The impact of de Gaulle’s heroic behavior, on the other hand, is still felt throughout the world. But from the narrow vantage of the Jews in France under the German occupation, the situation in France was (one shudders in writing these words) a relatively positive one. The most reasonable alternative to Vichy under the circumstances would have been a French version of the General Government in Poland. It is not hard to imagine what the fate of French Jewry would have been.
To Be a Jew in France During the Second World War is a sensitive, thorough presentation of the complexity of Jewish survival in France during that country’s darkest hour. Renee Poznanski’s detailed account raises crucial questions, and although not all her answers are compelling, the book is nonetheless absorbing and well-grounded, thought-provoking and filled with unconventional conclusions.
Yehoshua Porath is Professor Emeritus of Middle East History at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and a Contributing Editor of Azure.
