Out with the Jews!
WEBER, EUGEN
Out with the Jews! The Holocaust, The French and the Jews By Susan Zuccotti Basic. 400 pp. $30.00. Reviewed by Eugen Weber Joan Palevsky Professor of Modern European History, UCLA; author, "My...
...It is understandable too when we remember that, to most French, the Jews were—and are today?a minor problem compared to those presented by other French...
...scurrying for safety or caught in the trap of unwarranted confidence...
...Zuccotti covers her field clearly and calmly, making her points with a wealth of anecdotes and brief sketches, illustrating her narrative with individual stories that bring to life (and death) all the familiar horrors and less familiar ones...
...France, complained the royalist Action Francaise, was becoming the sump of Europe...
...As great a patriot as he was a historian, Bloch thought of himself and his family as thoroughly French and at first resisted, then reluctantly agreed...
...Once the War was lost and the nation was brought to its knees, the politicians held responsible for the disaster had to be brought to book...
...If hard times in the '30s revived xenophobia and sharpened endemic anti-Semitism, defeat triggered their paroxysm...
...Here Vichy's Jewish policy coincided with that of the Germans, accounting for its rivalry with the occupiers in hounding Jews...
...it was the rabid continuation of internal struggles that had raged unap-peased since 1934...
...But Jews, the target of racial laws that preceded the occupants' demands, were the tip of the iceberg...
...Vichy was not an immaculate conception...
...That is the only aspect of Vichy's anti-Semitism Susan Zuccotti's fine book does not bring out, and yet it is crucial...
...Another survey, in 1980, showed 12 per cent believing there were too many Jews in France...
...And foreigners?all foreigners, including at times Alsatian and Lorrainer refugees—were made much more unwelcome than they already had been from the day the Depression struck...
...But Zuccotti stresses the massive self-concern of the great majority, who were relatively aloof before the roundups of 1942 and increasingly sympathetic thereafter, albeit not actively...
...Britain, Canada, and the United States had practically closed their borders...
...In the library at the University of California's Los Angeles campus the on-line catalog lists 575 items under "Holocaust," including several journals...
...To anti-Semites, French Jews were tarred with the brush of their foreign brethren...
...Sufficient that Zuccotti has provided a compact, moving account that sometimes reads like the script for a new version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but that is never dull...
...The French share of the Holocaust was a French enterprise and, as always, French opposition to it was just as French...
...The author describes the situation before the War, during the War, and in the years that followed 1940: widespread prejudice and resentment, internments, roundups, expulsions, deportations, attempts to hide or to escape abroad, rescue operations by Jewish and non-Jewish organizations...
...but 16 per cent thought there were too many Spaniards, and 50 per cent felt that there were too many foreigners altogether...
...Few outlanders, of course, could do so...
...It is about attempts to connect events, to remember, to narrate as honestly as one can...
...That's from the Jews...
...Had French prefects, police, militia, bureaucrats, railway authorities, and railway workers not carried out their orders, the Germans would have needed far more men to achieve their murderous ends...
...they were furious to see the country dragged into unwanted conflict over Danzig in 1939...
...What The Holocaust, the French and the Jews does very well is depict an extraordinary variety of local and personal situations, reactions to ever harsher persecutions and responses to ever more pathetic appeals...
...or unselfish, brave and dedicated...
...Such folk had breathed a sigh of relief after the Munich settlement in 1938...
...The Jews: fearful, desperate or feisty...
...Death to the Jews," eliciting Darquier's comment: "For my last evening as a free civilian, I shall have seen a Negro lend a hand to a racist militant...
...Others actually looked and acted foreign...
...This raises the question why so much attention continues to be paid to French transgressions, and far less to what took place, say, in Holland or in Belgium where many more Jews were sent off to their deaths...
...The fact that the French never particularly liked the Jews is irrelevant in this context, because they do not particularly like anybody...
...Of 330,000 Jews in France, 24 per cent?nearly 80,000 men, women and children—were rounded up by French authorities, police and Army units, packed into French freight cars and shipped to an uncertain fate...
...It is not a criticism to note that much of what she tells us is well-known...
...or—as most often happened—displaying a sympathetic indifference to which many Jews owed their survival...
...Without French assistance and tolerance fewer Jews would have survived than did...
...One is struck by the different kinds of private initiatives, ranging from pilferage, robbery and denunciation to taking mortal risks to shelter and to help...
...They were distinctive in their strange garb, unlovely language, loudness, and special clan-nishness...
...We understand little, and we forget far more than we forgive...
...Darquier and Laubreaux, outnumbered, were rescued by "a superb Negro [negre], magnificently drunk," who waded into the fray crying, "He's right...
...A character in one of Madame de Stael's novels declares that to understand everything makes one very indulgent...
...Those who reproached them for playing a role out of proportion to their numbers in medicine, law, journalism, education, and entertainment, could now accuse them of doing the same in the Resistance...
...In the crowded restaurant their remarks about the dirty Jews responsible for the War attracted increased attention...
...The men of Vichy were not sorry to rid themselves of unwanted metics?the Greek word for strangers—especially Jewish ones...
...through the 1920s...
...More likely it is because France was the only country defeated by the Germans that kept a government of its own and bent its efforts to destructive policies coinciding with those of the Nazis...
...Yet at that very time we find him writing to a Jewish friend that one must discriminate between Jews French and foreign...
...Freemasons were hunted also, as foes of the Catholic Church and symbols of the secular Republic Vichy replaced...
...In Palestine, the mandatory power made access difficult for Jews in order to appease the Arabs...
...Although Vichy halfheartedly sought to discriminate between French and non-French Jews, the effort eventually failed...
...I don't understand," Laubreaux retorted...
...Assimilated French Jews, torn between identification with and rejection of their fellows, took a dim view of Ostjuden who, by the outbreak of the War, represented almost half the country's Jewish residents...
...The Jews have won...
...In any case, History is not about indulgence...
...You hate this War...
...It then tried to rid itself of those people in the years of unemployment after 1932, only to face a new wave of unwanted arrivals from Nazi Germany and other anti-Semitic countries to the east, not to mention a heavy tide of Spanish refugees...
...They know that, contrary to received fiction, human beings are neither very attractive nor very safe to handle...
...That is understandable if one recalls dire circumstances where, compared to one's own straits, the predicaments of others weighed little...
...In April 1941, Lucien Febvre pressed his coeditor of the Annates, Marc Bloch, to give up his joint ownership and editorship of their venture so that it could continue to appear...
...Moreover, they were perceived to be associated with the Left that talked about the rights of man and of political refugees, as well as with anti-Fascism?hence with conflicts that many felt were no business of the French, and with the Communists who desecrated churches and murdered nuns south of the Pyrenees...
...France, they argued, had no reason to fight, no interests to defend—save those of Jews who turned it into a cat's-paw...
...But Zuccotti tells us that while roughly 45 per cent of the foreign Jewish community was murdered, about 9 per cent of French Jews perished too...
...No less the foreign elements that had not only preyed on the country and corrupted it, but had driven it to this extremity...
...The underpopulated country had welcomed a larger number of immigrants than any land except the United States—more than the U.S...
...Or because France, home of the rights of man, so significantly failed to uphold them...
...It was no accident that the first Jew to die for attacking Germans after the Armistice was executed as early as August 1940...
...Everything's lost, old friend...
...The young woman was not alone, and a general roughhouse followed...
...They found it no bigger problem to turn over political opponents the Nazis wanted—Socialists, Communist and Jewish refugees—than did Stalin without suffering any defeat...
...staying to fight, to care for family members, or simply to show the flag...
...author, "My France" In early September 1939, Alain Laubreaux of the anti-Semitic weekly Je Suis Partout ran into Louis Darquier de Pelle-poix, a loud-mouthed bohemian destined to become Vichy's Commissioner for Jewish Questions, at the Brasserie Lipp...
...But soon racial laws forced others to take sides...
...More foreign-born Jews (70 or 80 per cent of the deportees, depending on how you count them) were handed to the Germans, and more died...
...If one Jew in four was deported, three in four were not: a horrendous score, yet better than that of any other European country except Denmark...
...French Jews have to make it clear that "their cause is not exactly our own," and the outlanders should be encouraged to emigrate...
...This makes their tacit or active aid still more impressive...
...Zuccotti does not let us forget that, indeed, many survived...
...Is it simply because there are more French historians...
...However those who resented the growing foreign presence tried to get rid of gatecrashers, they persisted...
...True French are not racist: their reservations include all of the human race...
...The Jew was the resident alien designate, the stereotype of the unwanted stranger...
...Finally, a young woman got up from her table and slapped Darquier: "There...
...Jews were overrepre-sented in the armed Resistance from the start...
...What is interesting, though, is that 11 per cent expressed the same doubts about Corsicans, 8 per cent about Alsatians, and 4 per cent about Bretons...
...There is a difference, he insisted...
...Far from simply a displacement of republican ins by anti-republican outs, the rout of May 1940 justified the pacifists and defeatists of all stripes—reactionaries, moderates, Radicals, Socialists, and renegade Communists—who opposed the War...
...In 1978, a public opinion survey recorded 9 per cent of respondents doubting that French Jews were really French...
...The gentiles: brutish, greedy, blinkered, and bureaucratic...
...Susan Zuccotti has advanced the cause of surface understanding of events whose core will forever remain obscure...
...Darquier explained that the next day he was going off to the Army...
...Some of these strangers grudgingly admitted (but admitted nevertheless) were merely foreigners...
...The French are an old and experienced people...
...As the clouds of war gathered, the French Left and Right began to share this feeling: Pacifism and exasperation carried the Right-wing slogan into the Left-wing press and into general parlance...
...That is a very incomplete sample of writings numbering in the thousands, but enough to demonstrate how difficult it is to say a great deal not already said on the subject...
...They've had us, Alain...
...It is a crime and a filthy trap, yet you join in as if you approve those who have brought it about.'' The two men fell to arguing in loud and louder voices...
Vol. 76 • May 1993 • No. 7
