A Few Books About The Holocaust in France

Petain and Hitler

 

* SPECIAL HOLOCAUST IN FRANCE READING LIST  *

 

 THE HOLOCAUST IN FRANCE - Yad Vashem

"The Jews in France were deported to the East at the height of a two year process of persecution and aggressive legislation. The laws passed included statutes defining who was to be considered a Jew, isolating Jews from French society, divesting them of their livelihood, incarcerating many of them, and registering their names with the police....

A total of some 76,000 Jews from France, most of them from Paris, among them 11,000 children, were deported by train to the East. Most of the deportees were murdered in Auschwitz. Most of the deportations left France from the concentration camp of Drancy. The deportations continued even as the Allies had begun to liberate France. The last transport left France in August 1944, while the battle for Paris was being fought. Of all the Jews deported from France to the extermination camps in the East, a total of some 2,500 survived."

 

Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.

 

 (Special alert for Mr Vincent Peillon: Sarah's Key is FICTION. But it is describing an event - Vel d'Hiv - which is real.)

"At dawn on the 16th of July, 1942, some 4,500 French policemen began a mass arrest of foreign Jews living in Paris, at the behest of the German authorities. 

Over 11,000 Jews were arrested on the same day, and confined to the Winter Stadium, or Velodrome d’Hiver, known as the Vel’ d’Hiv, in Paris. The detainees were kept in extremely crowded conditions, almost without water, food and sanitary facilities. Within a week the number of Jews held in the Vel’ d’Hiv had reached 13,000, among them more than 4,000 children. Children between the ages of two and 16 were arrested together with their parents....

The French reactions to the arrest and deportation of Jews varied between active collaboration with the Germans, indifference, and empathy toward the persecuted Jews. Most of the civil administration and the French policemen who had been allocated to conduct the arrest collaborated with the authorities...."

 

Alphabetical listings, by transport, of c. 70,000 Jews deported from France (1942-44). Entries include birthplace, age, and nationality. Additional lists contain the names of 5,000 Jews who died in French internment camps or were executed by the Nazis in France.

 

 

Drieu La Rochelle, Céline and Brasillach were all gifted writers, and all were vehemently anti-Semitic fascist sympathizers. Brasillach edited the Jew-baiting weekly Je Suis Partout before the war, and continued to do so enthusiastically under the ­occupation. Other writers and artists simply carried on as if nothing had happened....in Paris, theaters and nightclubs did a roaring trade, eager to amuse the large contingent of German soldiers. The list of writers and artists who did their bit for cultural fraternization is a roster of French culture and popular entertainment at the time, from Jean Cocteau and Jean Giraudoux to Edith Piaf, Maurice Chevalier and Django Reinhardt. The ardor with which some actively collaborated is almost less chilling than the sheer cynicism and amorality of many more. - NYT

 

Yeah. Mitterrand. Socialist President. And collabo.

The Lost Museum tells the story of the Jewish art collectors and gallery owners in France who were stripped of rare works by artists such as Vermeer, Rembrandt, Degas, Cézanne, and Picasso. Before they were through, the Nazis had taken more than 20,000 paintings, sculptures, and drawings from France

 

 Oh, Mr Peillon, there is so much more.... But you are a very, very busy man.