Not the Germans Alone (Un Hiver en Provence)

More inclined towards sciences than towards literature, and without any historical training, I wrote this book almost by accident. Moreover, I had not started writing it with the goal of publishing it; it was a document destined to stay in the family, and I got down to it more because of impatience while awaiting the denouement  of a little drama,  that of my « delicate » request to access the local archives (Archives Départementales de Vaucluse), still « forbidden » in 1992, whatever the views of the privileged authors of Un Passé qui ne Passe Pas.

Some will say that I had been refused access “in line with the law of 1979”; I should therefore not complain. Others, better informed, will contribute to the report of Guy Braibant, Conseiller d’Etat (Les Archives de France, Rapport au Premier Ministre, La Documentation Française, 1996) which will detail around 40 violations of the Constitution in this law of the arbitrary. In the end, I’ve got to thank Senateur Guy Penne for tipping the scale in my favor and obtaining an exceptional dispensation after a year of quid pro quo with the prefect. One more arbitrary.

If I had been granted what I was asking - copies of 3 or 4 documents - without any delay and without the need for political support, I would probably not have asked to see everything. This refusal had indeed led me to suspect that some were trying to hide information about the people who had arrested my mother. I was wrong. I did however not suspect the depth of the abyss I was about to discover. With hindsight, this explains the uneasiness of the keepers of the past in the face of my curiosity.

This book was born from the fears and the inertia of a system, and I have no regrets since this drove me to try and understand what, as a child, I had come to accept without any question. A captivating, though elusive, end. And in the end, I do not envy those who think they understood it all.

Since this book is already here, it is particularly dedicated to my mother, Sarah Goldstein, but also to all the forgotten of history.

This section of the site will provide you with some information about Not the Germans Alone and its author. We will provide here a few images of our daily life, before you get acquainted with the history of Vaucluse in the other sections of the site.

Isaac Lewendel