New Book

Serge Klarsfeld Preface

Isaac Levendel offers us an unconventional and even atypical book that is fascinating to read from beginning to end. This work belongs to the set of noteworthy regional, departmental and municipal studies that I was always hoping to see grow and that increasingly illuminate the more comprehensive historical works. However rather than proceed as the mainstream historians that set out to describe arrest operations, the itineraries of Jewish families or the biographies of the victims, this author has focused on the agents who were carrying out the persecution of the Jews, their court files, modus operandi, and psychological makeup. I have known what a dogged and methodical researcher Isaac Levendel is; I have known him for some thirty years since he came to France from the United States to retrieve the keys to his own fate. His motivations were rather straightforward: as a very young boy he had survived his mother’s arrest. He never could accept the disappearance of the mother he loved so much; he continued his dialog with her and set himself the task of finding out the truth and telling the truth about the barbaric treatment that turned him into a victim as well. The Vaucluse was and remains the geographical framework of this investigation. His previous book Not the Germans Alone told his story from a very personal viewpoint and enjoyed considerable literary and historical critical acclaim as it found an appreciative readership. He is a pioneer of an often fascinating category of books: reporting on a personal tragedy that involves the author. As Isaac Levendel returns to these same facts he comes to them with the greater detachment of the historian motivated by the passion to discover those responsible for the crimes against the Jews and their motivations.

The reconstruction that he offers is clear and unambiguous: in August 1942 the Vichy government had promised to hand over 10,000 stateless Jews living in the free zone to the Germans. Based on that commitment, the French national police did the arithmetic and limited the categories to be arrested to those Jews having entered France after January 1, 1936: the former Germans, Austrians, Poles, Czechs and Russians or Soviets. The quota for the Vaucluse was set; the gendarmes rounded up the agreed numbers of Jews on the basis of the census. They could have picked up ten or fifteen times more had they been ordered to round up all the Jews present in the département. Such an order was not issued. While Vichy wanted to reduce the Jews to the condition of pariahs it didn’t seek to kill them but knowing that the Germans wanted to exterminate them, it became an accomplice to the genocide. The xenophobic anti-Semitism of Vichy placed the foreign Jews on the front line in the occupied zone. Had the population and the churches not protested, Vichy could well have continued those arrests throughout the entire country with the same intensity as during the summer of 1942. There came a reprieve that lasted until September 1943 in the Vaucluse thanks to the Italian military occupation authorities. Following the German invasion of the Italian zone of occupation the condition of the Jews in the Vaucluse worsened very quickly. Levendel describes very effectively how small numbers of German policemen led to the surfacing of gangsters and thugs who became the long arm of the Gestapo. Just as the author was able to show how Vichy’s state sponsored anti-Semitism had given rise to anti-Semitic attitudes often motivated by lucre in the confiscations and aryanizations among France’s bourgeois class and those among them who had lost their status. As for the careerism of the top civil servants Levendel’s description fits in perfectly with the example of Maurice Papon, known to the French public since 1997.

Given the advantages it had in 1942 because of the empire, the fleet and the fact that France was quietly working in support of the Nazi war economy, Vichy had made its contribution to the final solution by a decision it took freely in the territory under its control where there were no Germans. Following the German invasion of the southern zone Vichy stopped handing down orders to the administrators of the prefectures for massive arrests of the Jews, with two exceptions, leaving the initiative to the Germans whose approach it was in each and every Kommando in each département to attract those individuals ready to do anything out of hatred for the Jews or for money. Levendel clearly shows how the Jews, registered on the census or just known as such, became easy prey to the Gestapo that managed to grab three times more in 1943-44 than the Vichy police had in 1942 because it only considered the Jews as having one nationality that of being Jewish and because there wasn’t a preset number as in august 1942. In all about one quarter of the Jews in the Vaucluse died while the rest survived. The same scale of numbers appears for the whole country: 80,000 were lost; 240,000 were saved. Levendel can’t quite tell who saved them; yes; the population didn’t denounce them as the legend goes, yes there were acts of solidarity and yes, the allied victory helped the survival rate. What he does know and describes to perfection is the involvement of French gangsters being handled by the SS to undertake the dirty work that Vichy refused to continue ordering its police to do and that the Germans couldn’t carry out since they were giving priority to the fight against the resistance and the security of the German army.

Isaac Levendel also established the minor role played by the Milice in the hunt for the Jews.  By using the archives of the Courts of justice he describes fifteen cases of members of the Milice who helped some Jews in dangerous circumstances. This is not indeed as giving them an award as Righteous among nations but to understand the complicated reactions of some and show how the resistance fighters were often somewhat indifferent to the plight of the Jews.

The course of justice in the immediate postwar period indicates how far behind the punishment of crimes the persecution endured by Jewish families had been relegated. What was true for the Vaucluse also applied to the rest of France. It took the sons and daughters of Jews of France who were deported to take charge of the issue, change the memory of Vichy and inform the public conscience of this country what truly did take place and in what kind of crimes Vichy had been an accomplice. I read “The Hunt for the Jews” in just one sitting. You shall also read as I did because it is useful, hard and true.

      Serge Klarsfeld

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Francais

Provence 1940-1944