Paris, Avenue Trudaine. 4th past eight. Café Vis-à-vis Square d’Anvers. On the way, I pass the local school in the 9th arrondissement. Over the school large inscription: LIBERTÉ EGALITÉ FRATERNITÉ. On the school wall, the plaque: "To remember 300 students of this school exported between 1942 and 1944 to death camps only due to the fact that they were born Jews; innocent victims of Nazi barbarism and Vicha's government". My interlocutor, Elie Elbaz, writer, boy of artist André Elbaz, and grandson of Vivette Samuel, 1 of the most crucial members of the OSÉ organization, the War Society for Children's Aid, a organization that saved the lives of thousands of French children with judaic roots. Elie Wiesel estimates this figure, in the introduction to the book "Vivette", at 10,000.
OSÉ, in the Free Zone, was led by Andréa Solomon and Vivette Samuel; in the Occupied region the organization was led by Eugène Minkowski, grandpa of the celebrated conductor, Marc.
Andrée was an Alzatka, Vivette's parents were born in Jarmolinski and in Sharogrod, Eugène graduated from the 5th Government Philology Secondary School in Warsaw, where his parents came from. OSÉ was sponsored by JOINT (American-Jewish Joint Resolution Committee). Through the obtained funds, she rented properties inside ‘deep France’, close the Swiss border and the Italian business zone. distant from the ruthless Vichy administration bureaucrats, distant from the zealous French police, distant from the railway tracks to Drancy. However, close to the ports, high-mountain shelters, support centres la Résistence and houses on the hills over the Riviera, occupied until November 1943 by German racially indifferent troops of the Kingdom of Italy. I am trying to find in Polish Wikipedia any information about OSÉ, about Andrée Solomon, about Vivette Samuel. I find a single paragraph entry about Eugène Minkowski, but this entry does not mention his war activities, only technological ones.
In anticipation of Eli Elbaz, I am reviewing Vivette Samuel's book "Rescuing the Children: A Holocaust Memoir". I can see the names of OSÉ's heroines: any survived the war under Catholic names, others exported to death camps, others again tortured by the Gestapo without betraying their friends or their subjects. I read about the prisoner in Bergen-Belsen Madeleine Dreyfus, born in Sighișoar Elizabeth Hirsch, who, in collaboration with Caritas Suisse, evacuated children to Switzerland (who would have thought that Switzerland would volunteer to take over the 800 children!). On another page, I see the name Ninon Haïsch leading the 6th division of OSÉ together with Klaus Barbie Marc Haguenau who was beaten in Lyon. Here – from London Edith Pulver, taken to Auschwitz by the same convoy as associate of the judaic branch of Résistance Jacques Weintrob, born in Tarczyn. On the next page I see Sabina Chwast from Warsaw, after the liberation of Buchenwald keeping alive the future Nobel laureate Eli Wiesel. Here, there is simply a photograph of the 1 born in Vilnius by Rachel Plumermacher, and here is the celebrated Vienna pedophile Françoise Brauner. I proceed to read about Lili Garell, born in Tsarist Russia, a friend of the Mima class Marcel Marceau, who was later under the courtesy of OSÉ. Father Marceau, born in Będzin, was taken to Auschwitz by convoy number 69, 7 March 1944. And 2 convoys later, born in Warsaw Lea Fleldblum, who, after an accident, was deported to Auschwitz by convoy number 71, the same as Simone Veil.
Elie ElbazAfter a fewer minutes, Elie Elbaz joins me. Elie writes movie scripts with Oscar winner for “Son Saul”, Laszlo Nemes. He just got back from Los Angeles, and I know the last thing he wants to do is talk at dawn about war nightmares. But that is how Elie and Laszlo and I agreed: it is part of our earthly responsibility, regular and unusual. Eventually, Elie walks the children to the school building all day, from which his children would have been taken distant during the Parisian traps 80 years ago. “ It is the authoritative French honour and institution of what happened that reduces the murders of these children to distant historical events, just as the monuments of the dead in planet War I. The only good that comes with terrible clashes with the French ultra-right is that the debate on the anti-Semitism of the French is being discussed in the present time. Keeping this debate in the present time is our duty."
Michael Gieleta: What does the average Frenchman know about camps specified as Rivesaltes, created for deprived of citizenship or fleeing Poland, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands of Jews? About hunger illness, about deficiency of access to sanitary facilities, about barracks without heating, about “internating Jews”?
Elie Elbaz: People mostly know about Drancy...
But they know what? That it was a German camp from which to leave for Auschwitz?
No, they know the camp was run by the French.
And they know about Vel d'Hiv's catch?
Yeah.
And that the French police did it?
Yeah. You even have it written on the plaque.
And even Le Front National knows that?
What do they care? But no 1 knows about another camps.
The description of the Rivesaltes camp from your grandmother's memories is terrifying. Reading about the conditions in the barracks of Birkenau or Dachau, you can anticipate it in any way. But in a camp created by the French?
Remember, it was originally a camp created for Republican refugees of the Spanish civilian War. The first intentions were not wrong.
Is that erstwhile Vivette interrupted her doctrine studies at the Sorbonne and got into the bombed-out Barcelona to aid war victims?
Yeah.
And erstwhile she returned to France, she wrote at the University of Toulouse in the psychology department about her studies of bitterness?
Under prof. Ignacy Meyerson born in Warsaw. Is he known in Poland?
I'm moving Wikipedia's website fast. No, he's not there.
Too bad. He survived the war, fighting as a 50-year-old in Résistence!
And what did Grandma say privately about Rivesaltes?
I remember that word from home, like it was the name of 1 of the offices where she worked. The problem is that the word “Rivesaltes” is mainly associated with wine. With the esteemed vin de Rivesaltes.
Like Vichy?
Everybody's acquainted with Vichy's government.
But anyone can besides go into a pharmacy and buy pills for Vicha digestion or mineral water.
But even erstwhile buying Vichy's eye cream, you know it's the name of a collaborate government and the name of the cloth for tablecloths and napkins. This, of course, creates cognitive dissonance. Buying vin de Rivesaltes, you don't have dissonance. Nobody knows that name but wine.
Since I found out that the victims of the action at the Polish Hotel in Warsaw were exported in comfort first to Volvic spa village, after which they returned to Poland in freight cars consecutive to Auschwitz, I feel sick seeing Volvic water. Do you know publically that the camp was there?
No, but everyone in school learns about police collaboration and the function of Vichy's government.
What about the grandchildren of the people who ran those trains with the great-grandsons of war police? I remember my surprise when, in Poland, well-known historical facts began to be painted by a generation of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
In France, this is considered a common phenomenon. It's due to society, due to Vicha's unconstitutional government. After all, there was a French government in a abroad country in London. Collaboration with the SS is simply a fact. The cooperation of the French police with the Gestapo is simply a fact. It is taught and collectively recognized on an impersonal level. As for individual introspections of grandchildren or great-grandsons of collaborators, you don't hear about it. possibly there's no request for that, with the common designation of guilt?
We order coffee, 2 double espressos. Avenue Trudaine is undergoing 2 wealthyly dressed Russian women, with 4 delightful, screaming children. Eli and I are exchanging eyes, knowing that both of us are asking the same question: did it look like this in the first half of the 1940s? With coffee, I tell Eli the communicative of Mirk Tryczyk and the individual price he paid for the release of “Drzazgi”.
Here, if individual described the past of collaboration in their own family, they would be moved with their arms saying, “Yes, we know, my grandparents most likely did too.”
Is that what Chirac was talking about in France?
Chirac officially recognized the function of the French State in the Holocaust. But at school level, this was said much earlier. The school program was clear in this respect, there was talk of guilt, about collaboration without resorting to excuses like “but we were under German business and had to do as we were told.” The past lesson indicated that most of the French were collaborators. Only modern historians point out that since 75% of French Jews survived the war, the degree of collaboration and denunciation could not be that high.
See, 1 of the most paradoxical passages of your grandmother’s book describes an episode in which a woman’s grandma who helps her in the camp hears from her: “You are French? I did not know that real France inactive exists!’ This is simply a French hebrew to a French Jew. I cannot imagine specified a thing in Poland.
But my grandma felt French first. She may have felt judaic erstwhile the Germans entered. But by aligning the rights during the French Revolution, emancipation of women, assimilation of Jews and the final of the Dreyfus affair, many Jews fell into a trap of their own naivety. If the government in Vichy made them register, then it's to defend them? Let us remember that the first anti-Jewish laws were introduced against abroad Jews, which had to strengthen the French sense of belonging.
Vivette writes rather openly about the demoralizing aspect of camp life, about the depression of parents, about the rejection of parents by children stored in clean home conditions in others. The socialisation or rehabilitation of children outside the framework of free society. In Rivesaltes, individual comes up with the thought of organizing Hanuka for your children, which is simply quite a few stress for your grandma due to the fact that she doesn't know what it is.
Although Vivette's parents were inactive born in the Settlement Zone, and grandma was the first generation of household born in France, the household was secular. Empathying Vivette with the planet without cultural or national divisions did not begin with helping judaic refugees in Rivesaltes. She was in Rivesaltes of the same imperative as in the bombed Barcelona. During the war, OSÉ issued her order: to get inside the camp as a volunteer.
To your grandfather's support. What kind of father makes a kid get into a concentration camp on their own?
Somebody had to aid these kids. If, until the full business of France by Germany, the Vichy government allowed aid to the youngest, individual had to take care of it. The full organization had to decision to the underground after November 1942.
There was besides selectivity due to the fact that not all kid could physically last camp conditions or have cousins who could afford a visa to America. Not all kid smuggled out of the camp went to the perfect house. Not all children were perfect.
Perhaps that's why in the Introductory Word to Vivette Elie Wiesel's book, he writes: “Look at the misfortune as the doctor looks at the disease.”
Our friend Laszlo showed in his Oscar movie not only the device of Doom, but above all the revolt of Sonderkommando. 1 of many, in many extermination camps. The ghettos regularly held diversion actions and uprisings, the largest of which will celebrate for a fewer months the 80th anniversary, contrary to popular passive communicative Jews waiting for alms from good Christians. In your grandmother's book we have a akin account: judaic self-help, involving a full community, from nurses to doctors, from disqualified academic professors to advanced school teachers, knowing that they can do nothing to halt the removal of elders, investing, from the pockets of American judaic organizations, in the youngest generation, protecting them, as best as possible, from the camp trauma.
The biggest challenge for Vivette was to take care of 600 children liberated from Buchenwald who knew no another reality than the camp ones. Grandma tells the communicative in her book of a Buchenwald boy who realized what it was to feel freedom erstwhile he broke something and was not beaten for it.
And you, sitting here in the sun by coffee would say that freedom brought your household Happy ending? For 6 million European Jews and their families, there was no specified thing as Happy ending.
For so many it was complete ending. Without kids or grandchildren to pass on anything. A complete end or, otherwise, a complete deficiency of it. I don't know if Vivette would consider her story Happy ending. She lost the man she loved most in the world, her father. But most of her household survived the war. So possibly she'd say that. happier ending.
