Open Secrets of the Holocaust

...Richard Lichtheim, in one of his countless letters from Geneva, declared as early as the summer of 1942 that "we now know that deportation means d e a t h , " but at that point he himself did not always grasp precisely where the trains were going or just how in every case the Jews were being killed...

...Acting upon their own initiative and not German o r d e r s , French police officials insisted that young children be included in the transports out of the country, a move independent of any decisions made in Berlin but a source of special satisfaction to Eichmann and his colleagues for its THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1982 19 confirmation of French readiness to participate fully and even eagerly in the anti-Jewish actions...

...The result was that the information reaching British policymakers was played down or just put aside, the idea (construed in its most benign terms) being that the end of Jewish suffering would come with the Allied defeat of Hitler and the end of the European war itself...

...Details at first may have been lacking, but the larger picture was obvious enough for anyone willing to see it...

...set out to tell pretty much the same story, namely, how and when information about the extermination of the Jews became available and how various individuals, institutions, and governments responded to such information, or, as was more often the case, failed to respond...

...Tens of thousands, however, particularly foreign-born Jews, were taken to concentration camps, of which there were more than thirty in the southern zone by the fall of 1940...

...Department of State minimized, muffled, or otherwise suppressed the information they were receiving...

...What is the point of telling and retelling such a tragic story...

...The bombing of the synagogue on the Rue Copernic is a reminder...

...They feel the need, as he put it, to turn the dial to something else...

...Marrus and Paxton show that France under Pe'tain and Laval did not need much encouragement from the Germans to set into motion and to sustain a full-scale program of discrimination against the Jews...

...As Laqueur points out in his opening chapter on Germany, that country "was not a hermetically closed society," and "despite secrecy and disinformation the final solution' was an open secret almost from the beginning...

...And Albert Camus, it might further be recalled, solved the problem of the French writer under occupation by joining the Resistance...

...As Herbert Morrison, a member of Churchill's War Cabinet, put it, if more Jews were allowed in, it might " s t i r up an unpleasant degree of antiSemitism (of which there is a fair amount just below the surface), and that would be bad for the country and the .Jewish community...

...What makes the French case so dismaying--especially for those who traditionally looked to that country as an exemplar of liberal democratic values--is the autonomous character of its anti-J ewish policies...

...Here in early June we could buy the New York Review of Books and the Village Voice...

...Pryce-Jones's richly illustrated and often brilliantly descriptive history of Paris during the years of German occupation shows that street life in the French capital was far from destitute despite the inevitable hardships brought on by the war...

...The assassination of Jewish children in Antwerp and of Jewish worshippers in Vienna is a reminder...

...As a result, Vichy France won for itself in 1942 the appalling distinction of joining Bulgaria as the only other European country freely to deport Jews from territories not subject to German military occupation...

...While the anti-Jewish terror provoked some protests, the apparent turn in public opinion proved to be short-lived, and before long, life in France returned to its normal patterns of accommodation...

...Some in England thought that it would, and they used such arguments not only to suppress the news of the Nazi massacres but to discourage the large numbers of Jewish refugees who might look to Great Britain as a haven from H i t l e r ' s fury...

...Consequently, rescue attempts--in those countries where rescue was still possible-were r e t a r d e d r a t h e r than encouraged, the prime worry here the reaction of the Arabs and not the relief of the threatened Jews...

...In it one finds this not very loving statement: "We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it...

...Zionist and other Jewish organizations had listening posts in Geneva, and through the effective work of two men in particular, Dr...

...The first set of questions is answered in Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton's Vich7 France and the Jews.~ The last question is addressed in vivid detail by David Pryce-Jones's Paris in the Third Reich...

...One wants to forget, and yet each day's news returns us to memory...

...Of the rest, most were shipped off to Drancy or some of the other camps and from there sent to their deaths in Auschwitz...

...Lawrence's Etruscan Places, we and other Sunday visitors s t e p p e d respectfully around lovers lying abstracted out of time in the long g r a s s - - a s were those other lovers who lay in one another's arms in the open middle section of Ponte Vecchio in 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1982...

...John P. Sisk ALL FOR LOVE: EUROPE IN THE SPRINGTIME Love dopes the Western world...

...The cabarets and restaurants remained open, as did the theaters, museums, cafes, music halls, race tracks, libraries, and educational institutions...

...As these figures indicate, there were obvious advantages to going along with the Germans, and some of France's best known intellectuals did what they thought they must to maintain their careers...

...What does it say about the imagination of the Allied powers that they were reluctant to give credence to such a plan...

...In sum, the fate of the Jews was a marginal issue, unpleasant, no doubt, but not of priority concern...

...Why, the question is ~metimes asked today, dwell on the Holocaust...

...The French anti-Jewish statute of October :l:Basic Books, $20.95...

...What about England and the United States...

...Might not such revelations also result in an increase of anti-Semitism on the home front...

...While there was a measure of opposition from within French Protestantism and, to a lesser degree, from some left-wing Catholics, the evidence seems to be that most people simply didn't care, at least in the early period of the persecutions...

...While there were shortages and inconveniences for many, there was also more than a little semblance of business as usual for most...

...The artistic establishment did not cease its activities, nor did the professional women of the streets and avenues of night-time entertainment...

...Even if Auschwitz had maintained its secret for months after the gas chambers went into operation, t h e r e still would have been no lack of reliable information about the Nazi war of genocide against the Jews...

...People may not always have wanted to believe the information they were receiving, or possibly they felt helpless or reluctant to act upon it, but there is no question that millions knew just how matters stood with the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe...

...pryce-Jones cites the figure of 9,348 titles published in France at the height of the war in 1943 (compared with 8,320 Ameri20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR .JUNE 1982 can titles) and 225 full-length feature films and over 400 documentaries and cartoons produced by the French film industry during the occupation, overtaking production in Germany...

...Indeed, to this day the Soviet Union refuses to acknowledge that a specifically intended Nazi holocaust of the Jews took place in Eastern Europe...

...The same, of course, held true for French bankers, businessmen, craftsmen, and others, many of whom were glad to see the Jews go, especially if their departure could be sanctioned, as it was, by French law...

...In a series of strident pronouncements delivered throughout the 1930s, the German Ff.ihrer vowed the wholesale spoliation and destruction of European Jewry, and, as early as 1935, with the passage of the Nuremberg laws, he set about to enact his murderous obsessions...

...The scapegoating of the pitiful remnant community of aged Polish Jews by General Jaruzelski's propagandists is a reminder...

...In the United States, John McCloy played a similar role and more often than not acted to obstruct or otherwise discourage the recommendations of Roosevelt's War Refugee Board...

...Philosopher...

...The general mood, in fact, was one of indifference, if not outright appeasement and complicity...

...In Siena we saw young lovers kissing as they came hurrying hand-in-hand down the narrow and treacherously cobbled Via di Citta...

...No matter which way one turns the dial, the old images present themselves, the unfinished, unmastered histories revive, r e a p p e a r i n g at times in the oddest ways and in the unlikeliest places...

...The unwanted Haitians remind...

...In such a climate it is not surprising that Jews were denounced by the tens of thousands to the German offices and the French police, or that Drancy, the large concentration camp located conspicuously just outside of Paris, which was to receive so many of them, functioned smoothly enough and, through most of its lifetime, under French and not German jurisdiction...

...Nothing that Sartre wrote in it about Heidegger or Husserl gave grounds for anything except official satisfaction...

...As early as December 16, 1939, the Times of London was predicting the outcome of Hitler's campaign against the Jews...

...When Anwar Sadat was murdered, for instance, the government-owned radio in Libya capped off its report of the assassination on a note of jubilant celebration, remarking that the Egyptian president had "lived like a Jew and died like a J e w . " Turn the dial whichever way one likes, everything reminds and will continue to remind...

...But just at that point when the would-be amnesiac within each of us thinks he has got away free, history r e t u r n s to remind us all over again of what it is we would be rid of...

...His program of identification and roundup called for the imposition of the Star of David, a move that French officials objected to and tried to resist...

...Horribly inh'umane places, they contributed, as Marrus and Paxton understate, "one of the darkest chapters in Vichy policy toward the Jews...

...Nobel Prize winner...

...There were moments in Modigliani's last years when he probably would have agreed with Mailer, but it is hard to see the John P. Sisk is Professor of English at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington...

...Where did the Jews go when they were forced out...

...After all, when P~tain allowed himself to be photographed at Montoire with Hitler and publicly declared that " i t is with honor and in order to maintain French u n i t y . . , that today I am embarking on the path of collaboration," the average Frenchman could hardly have been expected to act differently...

...AWACS reminds, Iraqi nuclear capability reminds, the threat of Syrian missiles reminds, Ararat reminds...

...Laws were passed that removed Jews from the judicial and educational systems, reduced their positions in the liberal professions, the civil service, and the army, purged them from commerce, the crafts, and industry, silenced them within the media and the cultural a r t s - - a l l this chiefly to further indigenous French goals and not to serve external Nazi designs...

...Laqueur's The Terrible Secret and Gilbert's Auschwitz and the Alliest both Little, Brown and Company, $12.95...

...There were those who thought the Jews were wildly exaggerating the extent of their suffering and discounted the reports of Nazi atrocities reaching them from the east as so much familiar Jewish " w a i l i n g " or " s o b s t u f f . " Others may have believed that unprecedented acts of persecution were under way, but until it was possible to verify the precise details it was thought better not to go public with such stories...

...The best estimates available today indicate that some 76,000 Jews were shipped out of France in cattle cars, only three percent of whom managed to return at war's end...

...After only the most preliminary confrontation with the Holocaust, one wants to look away from the horrors of a Nazi Germany or a Vichy France, to do away with t h e i r histories, dissolve t h e i r images, o b l i t e r a t e t h e i r memories...

...Of all the countries under occupation, none is more vexing or more disheartening to contemplate than France...

...The documentation offered in these two books is simply staggering in its size and detail, and the record of individual incompetence and antipathy, of institutional inertia, and even outright governmental suppression is heartbreaking and appalling...

...The need is human enough and not difficult to understand, although hardly possible to honor or respect...

...The mood of compliant adaptation lasted a long time, encouraged by the practical advantages that came with collaboration and, for some at least, reinforced by the nationalist fervor embodied in the ranks of the numerous French Fascist organizations...

...Part of the mood today is revisionist and rejectionist, and among growing numbers, t h e r e is little stomach for the Jews and their sorrows...

...As matters turned out, the Star of David was successfully imPosed and the Jews were to be doubly marked...

...Instead, the Vichy government took an action that Marrus and Paxton judge to have been even more t h r e a t e n i n g : " I t ordered all Jews' vital personal documents stamped J u i f or J u i v e . . . . lThus} instead of the cloth of the outer garment, which everyone could see, it p r e f e r r e d paper, concealed from all eyes but the civil servant's...

...Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $15.95...

...What one learns is overwhelmingly distressing: Too many people in the British ministries and the U.S...

...Collaborationist newspapers flourished, as did the publishing and film industries...

...As a kindly, truth-telling pastor recently told me, people in his congregation have had enough of the Holocaust and do not want to hear any more about the Jews...

...By contrast, . L _9 _9 - , Galtter-Bolsmere, it will be recalled, had preferred to sell secondhand books for a living rather than accept the indignity of submitting what he wrote to Nazi officialdom...

...As German soldiers began to return home from the eastern front or as they and others indicated in countless conversations, postcards, letters, and photographs, more and more of the facts began to seep out...

...The Swedes, the Swiss, the Spaniards, and the Turks knew through their diplomatic emissaries what was taking place, and their couriers frequently acted as a vital link with the Polish underground in passing valuable information to London...

...Indeed, the amount of information available was such that " b y the end of 1942, millions in Germany knew that the Jewish question had been radically solved . . . and that most or all of those who had been deported were no longer alive...

...Alvin H. Rosenfeld is Professor of English and Director of Jewish Studies at Indiana University...

...Thus, while functionaries in London and Washington quibbled over the nature of the reports, the trains continued to move their doomed cargos to what was commonly r e f e r r e d to as " a n unknown destination in the east...

...While numerous Jewish writers and musicians were silenced, and while a Bergson was forced to submit to the humiliations and implicit dangers of an anti-Jewish census (declaring himself as "Academic...

...On the basis of evidence already in hand, the Times reported that the Germans were establishing in occupied Poland a special "J ewish reserve" or "concentration a r e a " into which millions of Jews would be gathered "for gradual extermination...

...This is the way it is with lovers also...

...And how did the rest of the French population react as their Jewish neighbors were stripped first of their rights, then of their homes and property, and finally, as was often the case, of their lives...

...On the train to Paris we shared a couchette with a young couple so intoxicated with one another that they had no need of the Scotch we offered to share with them and seemed unaware that the car, in the best tradition of Italian railroading, had been dispatched from Rome without water and with unflushable toilets...

...Similar roundups took place in the unoccupied zone...

...In addition, the Jewish .section of the Paris Prefecture of Police had a card-file swollen with the names of almost 150,000 Jews, a massive r e g i s t e r to which the Germans had ready access...

...Well before the Nazis themselves encouraged it, the French authorities began to identify, round up, anti incarcerate large numbers of Jews...

...Equally bad, from this standpoint, would be a heavy influx of Jews into palestine, and, given the British White Paper and the bureaucratic will to enforce it rigorously, the restriction policy was applied with severity and obstinacy t o prevent Jewish emigration from the European countries to the Middle East...

...There were French firms that grew rich in their collaborations with the German war-industry, French artists and singers who grew famous, and French journalists who lacked no outlets for their writing...

...The Resistance took a long time to get going...

...Given the subject of his recent books, we would not have been surprised if Norman Mailer's contribution to the New York Review, announced on the cover as "A Vision of Hell," had taken off on the same subject...

...In a recent article in the New Republic, however, Laqueur cites new information showing that British intelligence was on to the true nature of Auschwitz as early as the spring of 1942, when the Allies decrypted daily reports coming from the camps, including the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau...

...This view prevailed in Washington as well as in London and was one of the chief arguments put forth in both capitals for not bombing the camps or otherwise diverting the military for any special attempt to save the Jews...

...The Bahai trapped in Khomeini's Iran remind...

...These two volumes provide as thorough and exacting a history of the French national collapse as most readers could hope to find in English...

...Mark's Square, in Rome at the Trevi Fountain, and in the Colosseum...

...The decision to impose a humerus c/ausus in the professions and the universities, for instance, was a French decision, enacted for what were considered honorahle reasons of national interest...

...In the Roman ruins at Fiesole, one of D.H...

...We saw them in their amorous isolation in Venice among the pigeons and the tburists of all nations in St...

...L'~tre et /e nladt [Being and NottSmgness...

...Did French public opinion know of such places and did it generally support the widespread anti-Jewish program...

...J e w . " ) , a Sartre or a Simone de Beauvoir found easier ways to get by: Sartre, who claimed that the line ought to be drawn at the collaborationist press, in fact wrote books and plays and the odd literary article for publication...

...A native tradition of anti-Jewish sentiment preceded Vichy by decades and included some particularly prominent intellectual exponents...

...They kissed between sips of Coca-Cola or Fanta as they sat on the banks ofLac Inferieur in the Bois de Boulogne, or as they stood in line on the ChampsElys~es to see Paul Newman in Le Policeman...

...As Pryce-Jones sums it up, "What are considered Sartre's masterpieces had seen the light of day with the swastika seal of approval set on them by the Propaganda Abteilung...

...In the words of David pryce-Jones, "What was good enough for P~tain was good enough for the man in the street...

...In time, Vichy's anti-Jewish program came to be exploited by the Germans, but its initial drive was inspired from within and not from without...

...Alvin H. Rosenfeld OPEN SECRETS OF THE HOLOCAUST Why won't the question go away ? World War II began officially on September 1, 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, but Hitler's war against the Jews already had begun many years before...

...These were built and maintained by the French themselves, and administrative responsibility for them, at least until the end of 1942, lay entirely with Vichy...

...Beginning in the summer of 1940, when the Vichy regime introduced a series of anti-Semitic measures, the French government systematically and energetically persecuted .Jews living in France...

...Or what does it suggest about the strength and motivation of their will that they did so pitifully little to oppose it...

...The Polish underground developed an extensive network of information that sent regular reports from Warsaw to London...

...Gilbert extends the time span to 1945 and the end of the war, concentrating primarily on England and the United States and on the abundance and variety of reports reaching these two countries...

...Of those who remained, many attempted to go into hiding, some of them successfully...

...The traditional Left was conspicuously quiet, and neither the Socialist Party nor the Communist Party exerted itself very strenuously in behalf of the Jews...

...They are raised anew and on the most serious levels of historical and moral contestation in two splendid recent books by Walter Laqueur and Martin Gilbert...

...Thus when it came time to give political expression to such hostility, the willingness to do so was ready at hand...

...Nor were the Soviet authorities blind to what was taking place, for much of the worst of it began within or only shortly beyond Russian borders...

...The policy extended across the Mediterranean, where the Jews of Algeria were quickly deprived of citizenship and in many ways treated even more harshly than Jews in France...

...The helpless Falashas remind...

...However, it turned out to be the introduction to In the Belly of the Beast by that ill-starred ex-convict, Jack H. Abbott...

...The fact is, most people do not know it, do not want it to be even remotely a part of their own story, and will not believe it...

...But this was not odd for we too had discovered that not only Paris but Europe generally, in the springtime or anytime, was for love of one sort or another, either in present fact or in recollection...

...More than a hundred of those arrested in this "Great Raid" committed suicide...

...Goethe wrote of his first experience of Venice that "nowhere does one feel himself more solitary than in a crowd...

...Gerhard Riegner of the World Jewish Congress and Richard Lichtheim of the Jewish Agency, there was a continual flow of news reaching Palestine, England, and America...

...Thinking of them, not Mailer, my wife and I left that place and walked along the Seine to a point where, on the approach to Pont Neuf and oblivious of the noonday traffic, two clutched-together young lovers had obviously chosen Modigliani over Mailer...

...Why rehearse the history of Jewish suffering over and over again...

...The Vatican was in a privileged position to ascertain the nature of events and, as Laqueur concludes, "was either first, or among the first, to learn about the fate of the deported Jews...

...Churchill seems to have understood the extent of the tragedy and was far more ready than most of his ministers to consider exceptional efforts but, as Gilbert makes clear, Churchill was not always the final arbiter of policy, and other, far less compassionate voices, such as Anthony Eden's, prevailed...

...Did no one believe him...

...The latter featured a piece by John Berger on Modigliani, then the subject of the exhibition we had recently seen at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris...

...According to Pryce-Jones, "Paris under occupation remained more tranquil than it had ever been in the years of peace...

...The return to THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1982 21 intellectual prominence of the French New Right is a reminder...

...At the time he wrote The Terrible Secret, Laqueur contended that it was uncertain just when British intelligence learned of Auschwitz, and Gilbert claims that not until the summer of 1944 could the Allies clearly identify this largest of the Nazi killing centers in Poland...

...In the first six months of the occupation, Parisians had watched their city being occupied, and their police and their politics and their press being" reconditioned, and they had reacted with absolute docility . . . . Nothing had taken place that can be called resistance...

...he had a few more weeks to live," and, in contradistinction to Beauvoir's avowal of incomplete knowledge of the camp, remarks that Drancy was an open secret...

...Tragically, as we know, too few did, but it is simply not the case that none of Hitler's contemporaries took him at his word...

...And so Gulag reminds...

...Cooperation among the French civil service, the police, and Nazi occupation officials was close, virtually assuring the success of their operations...

...While Laqueur sketches in the broad outlines of their involvement, one learns more from the fuller and copiously detailed n a r r a t i v e provided by Martin Gilbert...

...Despite the passage of almost forty years since the war's end, these questions not only remain with us but are being asked with a sense of urgency that seems to increase rather than lessen as the decades go by...

...The International Red Cross was not far behind in its own news-gathering capacity...

...If love be not in the horse there is nothing...

...Everybody in Paris knew what was happening...

...Don't people know it by now...

...Nevertheless, "like the Vatican the Russians knew much more than they decided to publish," and in what 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1982 they did make known they intentionally and consistently played down the facts of the "final solution...

...J u s t how "unknown" were the places to which the Jews were taken...

...The horror escalated at the end of June 1942 when Eichmann came to Paris and p r e s e n t e d Himmler's directive that all Jews living in France be prepared for deportation to the east...

...If millions of Germans knew, so too did countless others throughout Europe...

...Moreover, as both Gilbert and Laqueur reveal time and again, the mass shootings carried out by the Einsatzgruppen were well known almost from the start, and it was fairly common knowledge early on that hundreds of thousands of Jews had met their deaths in the ghettos of Warsaw, Lodz, and other places, as well as in the camps at Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka...

...The Vietnamese boat people remind...

...Young motorbiking lovers startled us with their temerity as they held hands traveling side by side on Rue Bonaparte, and young thespian lovers charmed us with their optimism at a Friday evening in Maggi Nolan's Celebrity Services office, where not too many Friday evenings previously the late William Saroyan had charmed everyone...

...The same held true of other of S a r t r e ' s wartime writings...

...This was not to be a scheme for "resettlement" but part of the preliminary planning for a program of unparalleled violence that would culminate in a "massacre such as Nazi imagination can conceive...

...effect of such moments in his paintings, s o many of which suggest a man who had not lost faith in an erotic utopia...

...Ezra Pound The great days of the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, when it was located at 12 Rue de l'Odeon on the Paris Left Bank, may be behind it, but in its present location across the Seine from Notre Dame Cathedral it is still a place where one can browse in an atmosphere that connotes a legendary past...

...Under the impetus of Xavier Vallat, a long-time anti-Semite appointed to the new ministerial post of commissioner-general for Jewish affairs, and later u0der his successor, the ardently pro-Nazi Louis Darquler de Pellepoix, French officials set about to eradicate the Jewish presence in French life...

...pryce.Jones depicts Simone de Beauvoir going out to Drancy "to wave gaily through the wire around the perimeter at a young Jewish acquaintance...

...the disquisition of German philosophy which was the basis of his professional reputation, was published in 1943 with the German censor's stamp of approval...

...9 "Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $25.00...

...yet there was neither spontaneous nor organized protest of any kind...

...1940, for instance, was both more stringent and more inclusive than German ordinances of that period...

...The paintings are so widely acknowledged," Berger wrote, "because they speak of love," and in case we had f o r g o t t e n , the editors reminded us in a footnote: "Paris in the springtime is for love, as we know...

...We saw lovers strolling hand-in-hand through the Modigliani exhibit or the Louvre, or ducking under the turnstile in the Rue du Bac metro station and kissing afterward...

...With an eye to surveying both the sources of war-time intelligence and its receivers, Laqueur focuses on the role of the Germans, the Allies, the neutral powers, the Vatican, the International Red Cross, and the Jews themselves, and though he restricts himself to the period between June 1941 and the end of 1942, be has no trouble compiling an enormous amount of information that flowed out of Poland and the other occupied countries...

...As military occupations go, the German occupation of Paris was relatively "soft" and bears virtually no comparison to the brutally harsh conditions that prevailed elsewhere in Nazi-occupied Europe...

...Emigration was difficult, and only small numbers managed to leave the country...

...Just how was Vichy's anti.Jewish program developed...

...Who were its principle actors, and what motivated them...

...The most dramatic of these took place on July 16-17, 1942, when the French police went into action (there were 9,000 of them, divided into some 900 a r r e s t i n g teams, aided by 300-400 auxiliary French Fascists), and rounded up almost 13,000 Jews, most of whom were seized at their homes and taken to the Vel d'Hiv, a large Parisian sports arena...

...Such measures had little difficulty winning support within the ranks of French professionals and the student unions, whose members realized that they stood to gain from the elimination of "foreign" Jewish competition...

...Still others worried that publicizing reports of H i t l e r ' s killings would infuriate the Germans and incite them to increase the pace of the slaughter...

...The roots of Vichy anti-Semitism went deep into French culture and reached large segments of the population...