Welcome, everyone. I'm Calypso Nicolaides and on behalf of the amazing Princess represented here by Frederic,
who's the director of the MFO and the History Department and the this very European centre, I'd like to welcome you.
And on behalf of these institutions, I have the great pleasure and privilege to welcome back among us Jacques similar who certainly,
as I think everyone in this room knows, one of the very most prominent historian of France and French historian of the issues that occupy us today.
And as you all know, Jacques Simla is now emeritus professor at some school.
Sara City has had an illustrious international career and has published several books, both in the issue,
starting with the issue of civil resistance, unarmed against Hitler, a civilian resistance in Europe.
3945 And his last book before was purifying Destroy the Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide,
which he presented them, which we launched in this very room a few years ago.
And indeed, we are here today to meet, to celebrate and discuss his very last book,
which was published five years ago in France and is just now published in English.
The Survival of Jews in France during World War Two.
Now, I'm not going to say much about the book at all simply to say that, as you will hear in our conversation,
this book is not only a remarkable foray in historical investigation and scholarship,
but I would say it's also really a kind of philosophical tale about the rays of light
in the middle of the darkest darkness that really defined our human predicament.
So it's a book about the light and the about that together. And we owe you an amazing sum.
And it is going to be our pleasure to have as discussants for the book today, as we always do for book launch,
our two wonderful colleagues from the History Department, Ruth Harris and Robert Gilder,
who are both very prominent, obviously historians of France, inter alia,
and both spent a lot of time thinking about these issues upstream historically roots, including with her book on the Dreyfus affair,
then kind of downstream historically Robert with his work on the post-war and and the sixties and his latest book,
Empire of the Mind on the Legacies of Colonialism.
So we're very much looking forward to hearing both of you.
But before I pass the floor on to Jacques, let me just say one personal word.
Here I am, Jacques. And I spend a lot of time talking together about these issues in 2016 when the book had come out in France.
But we were talking about I was staying at City where he was emeritus is emeritus professor and we talked about all sorts of things,
including how you deal with how you cope with the onset of blindness when you're a historian and
an intellectual and the fate of France and the history and the comparison between our countries.
But we also talked about our dear common friend, Stanley Hoffman, who plays have played a very important role in both our lives.
And in fact, you will see that the book is in part dedicated to Stanley.
And we remembered the story of Stanley during World War Two, which I captured on film, actually, in a documentary.
And it's a story where Stanley recounts and it's kind of a little microcosm of what your book is all about.
When Stanley, as a young adolescent with his mother, flew to this small French village in the south of France,
lament labour, and he was hiding in plain sight, as it were.
You'll hear more. The villagers kind of knew there were Jews in hiding, and they helped them in many different ways.
But there were German, young German occupants,
and Stanley and his mom were the only ones who understood German because they had come originally from Austria.
And he tells the story of how they would kind of listen in from these young German soldiers who were
16 year old and would get these letters from home about how everything was blowing up and stand.
And his mother had so much empathy and were so sad for these boys who were terrified that
they relayed the content of these letters that they heard to the machi in the mountain.
And for this reason, he thinks in that area of France, the market didn't shoot when these boys left the village at the end of the war.
There was a kind of seed of a strange empathy mediated by this mom and Stanley.
And this was a kind of a very beautiful story that we shared.
And on this note, I'd like to passed on the floor to you.
Jackson's thanking you for bringing to us this amazing and remarkable book that you've written in sync.
Thank you, Calypso, for your invitation and for all of you for your invitation and wish actually to to
dedicate this talking memory to sons of men who encouraged me to undertake this research.
Stanley wrote the two prefaces made from a book and subsequently slur and three and destroyed.
And I'm sure that he would have done something for this new one if he would not have left us too soon.
The idea of this book came to me exactly in 2006 when I, you know, in an international conference I co-organized in Singapore, in Paris,
about rescue practices in genocidal situations, actually, and became a book Resisting Genocide,
A Form of Rescues, published by Hearst and Oxford University Press.
We already knew that 75% of Jews survived in France, so to say blaspheme, that was an abstraction.
And during this conference, I just realised that there was no thorough historical research on this incredible fact, actually.
And quite striking because, you know, in Western Europe, 75% of Jews in the Netherlands were in the media and 45, 50% of Jews in Belgium as well.
So what happened in France, considering the fact that, you know,
the Nazi plan to exterminate all the Jews in Europe at least, and the collaboration of the Vichy government.
So in any case, it was not, of course, to avoid, to talk to,
to forget all the Jews who were exterminated from France, which is about 25%, 6 to 6000 Jews.
But this new reality, this new approach for me was at that time of use, I should work one day on that topic.
And the book now is a revised, deeply revised, updated and abridged version of my film.
A book based on Train on a Philosophy published in 2013 was named 904 pages, two kilos, 300 and.
Okay. So I guess this one is much more reasonable.
I hope so. How do you do work?
First, I gathered a quantitative and qualitative data.
My first concern was to transform this abstraction of the 75% in figure.
One can estimate that at least 200,000 Jews are still in France in 1944, perhaps more 227,000.
But I prefer to keep this lowest figure.
Now, can you explain this? Is it because sank of the Jews to the wall of Jews?
You know, the writers writer's imagination. We are they are approximately 4000 today in France.
So you cannot explain the survival of at least 200,000 people by the action of force alone event which is an admirable.
Is it, thanks to the commitment of rescue organisation, a Jewish organisation or a Christian organisation as well?
Difficult to estimate, but probably less than 10,000 Jews, mainly children, have been were saved by this rescue organisation.
And I guess this figure is overestimated.
So it's not possible as well. Way to explain the survival of 200,000 people through this organisation.
So it tends to my mind this obvious consequence, you know, Jews try to manage on their own to survive and mostly they did.
So at that point I wanted to collect qualitative data, I mean, of personal diaries, post-war memoirs,
etc., etc. about Jews with this basic question, if they lost their job, what did they do to survive?
Do French Jews? Did French Jews or French Jews behave in the same way?
What do did they move around or very little or stay at home?
What did they do with their children when, you know, children were threatened as well?
So you have plenty of pragmatic question, you know, and I try to collect different stories, some unknown such.
So, you know, and and bear sounds self would lend their study of many, many others.
Some are famous and not other.
Not at all. And that was the beginning at the beginning of the book, you know,
and I discovered that if you look at the story of the Jews, you are looking doing a research on migration.
And I would like to present now to my map, to my opinion for major contribution of this book.
This the first one is about geography.
I propose a geographic and demographic approach of the dispersal of Jews in France.
So it means that it goes it looks mainly to to the south and in the centre of France.
And if you want to understand this, you need to have a historian approach, or at least the coming back to the 1920s,
1930s, when Jews came to France from all over Europe to escape poverty, anti-Semitism and so on and so forth.
But you have also to take an account, a false migration.
I mean, after the Declaration of war in 1939, I don't know if you remember,
but and the French government forced mosaics since six and a thousand tons of as a small Moselle to go to Paris go to old Vienne and etc. Of course,
among them there are some Jews, a city like Goole, where literally emptied of the old population within three days.
But of course they are not only Jews, they are other people.
And then came this terrible event of the military defeat of France in 1947 to a union of people running to the south.
You know what we call the exodus.
I just I cannot imagine that kind of terrible event, you know, in during which France lost definitively lost its rank of first world power took over.
And among all of these people, there are some Jews, of course, finally.
And if we want to have an idea of.
What people experienced at that time, the sense that the number of people here read it in Switzerland says Buy Able to ski,
which is an extraordinary novel to understand what the French experience did at that time.
Finally, it came to the armistice ends of the formation of the regime, Vichy regime, and then this evolution.
I'm going to have heavy consequences on the Jews destiny.
Not only is that because you have to look at the French territory, the so-called French territory after the armistice.
I would like to make quickly three remarks.
First, Berlin got this French territory to shoot its own indirect strategy in Syria.
Of course, the two notes department.
No, and but they are integrated to, you know, our and the German command in Brussels.
The zone is the forbidden zone.
You know what Alsace Moselle is called like that because it's for welcoming German settlers.
You are the big one, the occupying zone, which the German army is committing it in Paris, the so-called free zone that we used this year.
And we forgot this tiny Italian zone in the south east, which are going to be larger in 1943.
So instead of two zones we are with you, think about that.
There are five zone.
And just imagine that this French territory was built almost over more than ten centuries in to two months is completely destroyed.
Dismantled. The second remark is this expression Vichy France, which is used for about four decades,
seems very misguiding because you can look at the reality of this French territory.
It is completely broken up. And so remark and this is why I would to introduce this point, it depends where you live,
because your destiny is morally linked to the place where you are.
Let's say, for example, the Jews who lived in Montpellier or Toulouse,
a better chance of survival than the Jews were living in Ira's last Lille in the north of France.
The same for, uh, for the occupied zone compared to the free zone.
I couldn't give many example of that. And this leads me to a concluding remark about this slide.
You see already the difference between survival and rescue.
Rescue means intentional act or safe rescue by the Jews himself,
but survival relies on the geographical and political status of the territory where you are now.
Basically, the Jews and the general movement is to go to the countryside.
This is my picture. Yeah, I know. This is a big circle.
With which road map? Yeah. Sorry.
I come back to my first question. You know, where are they in 1943, 44.
So I have the idea to make maps based on Vichy archives.
You will discover two in the book, one in 41 and this one in 43.
And this is based on archives because in December 1942, Jews were forced to have a G on their I.D. after the invasion of the three zone by the German.
And so we have these figures. And if you look at the map in 1941, 43.
Yeah, four years for you know, before you can see an increase that the number of Jews increased in the south part of France,
it goes from 110000 to 143000.
So this is the main tendency of this period.
You can estimate that more or less two thirds of the Jews in France are now living in just in this part of the country,
which is completely new because they were basically based in Paris in as well as Bordeaux in Marseilles.
But this is a big transformation.
But don't forget that at the same time, almost between 40,050 thousand Jews are still living in Paris, which is unique in Europe.
You know, in the show, no need to say that zero was already completely exterminated in them.
Is more or less the same. Why? How can we explain the fact that so many Jews are still in in Paris?
So general movement to the South, general movement to the countryside.
And France is a rural country.
And most of many Jews want to go to the countryside to be, let's say, their friends as possible to the German firms of German.
And the fact that at that time, France, as a needs as a railways network,
much more extensive than today with best connection to go to, you know, small villages in remote areas.
Explain this phenomenon.
So here this is the cover of the English version, you know, and it's a picture of the Landau family, you know, the famous actor that's on and on.
Of course, he was not yet born. But you can see this little girl.
It's it's it's anti alien.
And the man is his grandfather, Ramo Ramo Landau, which was a junior in Paris and the former mayor of Ecuador.
So they stayed there in this small village in Massif Central until the end of the war.
Now, let's go to the second contribution of hope of this world.
I tried to elaborate what I call a repertoire of avoidance and coping.
Uh, strategies. Just touches. So that's the main part of the book.
Book three, chapter out of four.
And I cannot go into detail because there's many, many moving stories in this part, in these chapters.
And I just try here to as the question is, is it possible to identify key variables,
key factors which explain, let's say, Jewish Jewish avoidance strategies, Jewish survival, tragic.
At this I can find five. First one is citizenship.
This was a rediscovery of my research and I cannot believe it when I realised that to stick to statistics,
to struggle almost 90% of the Jews or of the French Jews survived the Holocaust in France.
Can you imagine that? Of course, it's less for the French Jews, which are the main target.
You know, 60% of the French Jews survived the Holocaust.
But even this figure is, you know, incredible considering the lost in the other countries.
So, again, you explain this, at least this high rate of survival for the French Jews.
According to me, it's back to history. The history, it's the French Revolution in 19 1717.
91, which emancipate the Jews for the first time in Europe, and they came from different part of Europe to take profit of this situation in France.
And some of them saw in the through the 19th century, assimilated a country as a nation and move up even in the elites of this nation.
That's why this it's the Vichy statue of October 3rd is perceived by them as a betrayal of political retirement,
betrayal of their commitment for the nation. However, um, facing persecution, uh, they have some social resources to face, you know, to, to use,
for example, they have a relative means of freedom so they can send their children by example.
If perhaps you friend in the name of piano ha more great historian.
But that's the case of no family as they send their children in the south in the free zone.
Same for young people.
We are lucky you have many, many example and in their neighbourhood, in their, you know, of colleagues as well, some of them are ready to help them,
that there are social resources on the contrary for in Jews that don't they don't look at the story of Friedlander.
They were quite well established in Prague.
And when they came to France and then the something, you know, was virtually a drop in the social structures.
They cannot they don't have anything on almost. So they are much more vulnerable.
And all these Jews who arrived in France in the 1970s, they do not speak really France and the French,
they don't have any connection with the country, of course, are going to be the first target of the Nazi energy collaboration.
Now, I'm going to be fast for these other factors.
Solidarity, of course. I'm talking about the rescue organisations there.
You have also the financial resources which are so important.
You know, it is stealing. When you have some steal some money, it's easier to pay to to get a room to sleep or to pay a people smuggler.
Then also the age factor related to age, the older elderly people and the young children are certainly the most vulnerable.
And also the family situation.
The larger the family, the more difficult to move for this family, you know, and of course, they are much more vulnerable for this reason.
Now, another contribution to the contribution of this book and who helps them and how and when.
Now, again, to the question of anti-Semitism in this country.
I have known that in the UK, but not only in the UK.
The general feeling is French, strongly anti-Semitic.
At least it's a cliche perhaps. I would like to discuss about that.
And no doubt that anti-Semitic anti-Semitism was a rarity in France since the 19th century onwards,
although it's difficult to distinguish between anti-Semitism and xenophobia.
As, for example, Janet Jackson put it, at least in the 1970s, France was one of the years,
one or two years, even the earliest rate of immigration, including the Spanish people.
In any event, you know,
the formation of the Vichy regime was a political and uncanny assertion of state anti-Semitism at the worst moment that is under Nazi ises,
however, does it mean that all the French people were became anti-Semitic?
That's a matter, of course, a discussion, you know, Maurice Paxton Same.
So but there have been, you know,
discussed by other historians such as Chatelain or many people about he was was a the need
almost no best historian in terms of public opinion on the Vichy who strongly contested.
Maris in facts, don't you? Let's listen.
I don't want to be engaged in this discussion, although, of course, I'm quite inclined to think that polyamory work is much more articulate.
My answer is, again, as historian and then talking about chronology.
When Oak cured the mass deportation in 1942, meaning all these elderly people and children picked up by French police and friends and family,
people were moved, even shocked by what they saw.
And this was an important movement in the French opinion.
And you can notice this already when the yellow star was introduced in Occupy Zone, it was never introduced in the free zone.
If you read the Ellen's diary, you see sign of compassion of Catholic men who came to her and so on.
Yet you have also here the notes by Jack Belinsky, which are quite extraordinary.
Interesting. So the issue is of Believe Roundup.
This is my slogan. Okay.
So here I rely on the new book of my colleague Rosalie, which wrote the incredible chapter in this new book about the did roundup.
As you see, Nancy. And she wanted to do catch 27, 20,000, approximately 20,000 people.
Finally, they got so many men and women so good in any study in.
Sure. The reason for which this video roundup did not work very well.
First, leaks from the French police forms the perfect tool,
the police warning for Jews to a communist leaflet a few few days before go to hiding that the men understood that they go to ending,
but not the woman or the children, because so far they did not arrest women and children.
Three acts of spontaneous act of of solidarity, of protection, conscientious,
of passer by and then which is quite very interesting, the reaction of a zoo district, the commissioner of police.
So some of full of zeal and other and dragged their feet.
For example if you know the devil got a name because we have to is quite well known this year and next year will go to their parents.
Where? In Paris? In their apartment. So zoo could have been taken by this very deep roundup.
And the police knock at the door like that.
But they did not ask the instruction to destroy the door.
So this this policeman did not do so.
And this family were saved. You know, you have plenty you have to give, for example, like that.
So it's quite it's quite a myth.
Bye bye. I think it's most of the Syrian agree on this that this is a turning point as the summer 1940 flu.
And the first sign of this is the protests of different different Catholic bishops.
The most well known is by Jews. So, yes, on August 23, 1942, Jews.
How many Jews are women? Is this are men and women not discussing feminist revolt against them?
Just a word about Syria. Syria is quite normal, actually.
Yes, 72. So I don't I don't know if we can say today when you have since 72 you are an old man, but at that time could be considered like that.
Okay. But in addition in addition, she sees a disabled person.
He has aphasia. He cannot speak anymore.
Almost anymore. So what I found fascinating is that this man, almost death, generated this courageous and so crucial speech contest.
And you said to look at the worst failure of France of protesting against the.
Mass deportation of Jews in 1942. The others are also known, but I don't know if you knew the new mental ball.
It's it's to us is protest is much more, you know, modern, so to speak, from today.
Okay. But it's much more intellectual. And so, yes, as you know, very simple words to touch the people.
And of course, it's read over the BBC when one week after, you know, and what they discovered.
But we could use by the New York Times September 12, I guess.
And you have Aziz Jadallah in Marseilles and Jorginho and Moussa.
That is our view. But it has an impact on U.S. policy.
I wouldn't show you just after. Okay.
So that's this is a first it's the second sign is what happened at the bottom of the psyche of the society.
It's now well documented. And I, I made some efforts on that direction.
You know, you can identify what I call small gestures of protection, but, you know,
opposition to escape arrest, because when you are Jews is a French foray.
You cannot avoid persecution. But what is at stake is to avoid arrest every session.
So these small gestures are crucial for this.
So what what what do I mean by small gestures?
It's coming from strangers very of some sometime.
Very often it's a word. It's an act which could help you to get arrested, just like in the street.
But go and don't go home or just turn right.
Because the police at the court, at the opposite corner you have they in they appeared they appeared in a count
testimonies and they Jewish account testimonies in this period in the period.
And also, uh, of course in post-war Jewish memories, you have four characters that I didn't define in this account.
You know, the guardian angel warn of the danger, the oysters, of course, we shelters, uh, views of forger, uh, in all sorts of smuggling.
If you were, if you read or if you are never read, never read the book of Joseph Jerusalem,
a bag of marbles, which is an extraordinary story of these two Jewish young boys.
You will find these four characters. So I could I could develop this, although I'm sure I'm going to be too long.
You don't just mean. Yeah, and I mean. I mean. You mean it's something to do.
Well, okay, so, um.
But the villain. So I'm not. I'm not pretending this is resistance, you know, as a Judas, for example, study,
uh, I propose a new notion is social activity to to to describe that phenomenon.
I'm not pretending this is before a French exceptionalism, okay?
Because I think that's that kind of small gestures, what I call social activity, um,
appear as well in, in, uh, you know, in, in Belgium, you know, in Denmark and Google.
Yeah. And so on and so, so but what I would defend, what we would argue it's to say that, uh, France had the experience of, you know,
important moment of social activity, mainly between 42 and 43, 44, because before the French were mainly indifferent to the fate of Jews.
Uh, the turning point is this summer, 1942, and when I mean by social relativity this moment,
or in which when, when, you know, um, uh, individuals without any instruction,
without knowing each other, are going to help other individuals that they don't know,
who they not know as well, that they perceive their are in a difficult.
Situation or situation, great variability.
Also, this notion of sexual activity does not want to be artistic, you know.
At the same time, some French people are still indifferent to the sort of the fate of the Jews.
They are taking profit of them. They are taking their apartments.
All the bad things or denunciation and so on and so forth.
So I am not idealistic in that regard, but I just argue that this, you know, complicity and formal complicity helped Jews to survive.
And most of the most of the Jewish rescue organiser organisers recognise that.
So Poland is not France in that regard in terms of anti-Semitism.
Now I want to present you just this to a glance, I would say to this wonderful movie, The Old Man and the Child with Michel Seymour,
which tells the story of a young Jewish boy growing very which can become a famous
filmmaker to pay gratitude to this old couple in the growing global region.
He knew wonderful vision and contractors would take care of him.
Then let's not forget the real politic. So I'm going to speed up, you know, the real politic means of politics as the goals of the Nazi in Europe.
So I come back to my former book, Announce Against Hitler,
where there was some distinction between the countries which are directly and German control.
So zero is in the rate of Holocaust is very high.
And as a country where the in governments ends, it was the case of France.
So I agree with Paxton at that point of Vichy has a margin of manoeuvre not only before 22, after 22, also before.
And you can show this through this as this life, this new slide has been discovered,
this German minute of the means of meeting with the world when it was there, you know,
as a protest of the church in the level do not want to say openly was reluctant to
fully cooperate with the deportation of the its can be the basis of the figures.
42 is the worst period for the Jews in France, meaning it's more or less 40,000 Jews were exterminated.
You see a drop in in 1943 go between decreased to 17, but increase again in 1944 at the time of Vichy, the almost dying.
It's becoming a mini state. And this figure is only for the six months of 1944.
So fortunately, the Allied landing in June 94 was successful.
Otherwise, the rate of the Holocaust in France would be higher.
And finally, this is my main argument.
But I mean, to this I would say I would not argue that, um, 75% of Jews were saved in France, but which is different.
They survived, meaning different factors.
And then people approach.
And finally, I like also I also like the German cover of the book because it put together it bring together a structural factor.
You see the link line, demarcation line.
It's a, you know, so you see the free zone plus this women who are going to take care of these two Jewish children.
Thank you. Thank you, Jack. And obviously this is such a rich book, you can only touch the tip of the iceberg.
But it's it was a very enlightening presentation, obviously.
And now I would like to turn to Robert Frost.
Thank you so much, Jack. I know the book interested me so much because it made me think about how things have changed since I was a child.
I was raised going to Hebrew school and it was always discussed as.
The Holocaust being absolutely unique and unspeakable horror.
That meant that in a sense, you could not compare it to anything else.
And this notion of the uniqueness of the Holocaust was with us until the early 1990s.
And I remember having my young colleague, Dan Stone, he came, he wanted to write on this historiography,
and actually they tried to kick him out of the history faculty as it wasn't really history
because it was historiography and also the even then it was considered so outrageous.
So this notion of uniqueness while seeking to give justice to the Holocaust is a very extreme form of horror.
Also had the unfortunate kala of setting Nazi extermination apart.
And it made comparative analysis impossible with other genocides.
So that we had this thing of Judaism being and Jews as the particular groups and the only group that was persecuted.
And it also tended to suggest a certain Jewish victimology.
And it went along with somebody like me who grew up in the States with a certain unselfconscious Zionism at the time that was almost dogmatic.
This notion of the Jewish victim, this victimology,
made it difficult to assess and investigate the role of Jews in resisting and defending themselves as well.
They were seen as one undifferentiated mass that went to the gas chambers.
So what's remarkable about this book is that it's moving us even further down the road of comparison and making us think about France,
not just Denmark or Belgium or Bulgaria, as a case in its own with its own context.
And for that, I'm deeply grateful. The other thing I wanted to speak about just briefly was some of the stories that you told.
And I keep on thinking about what you said about people taking over people's
apartments and jobs and the denunciations and why it was that so many non-Jews,
secular and Catholic, felt such a sense of entitlement about taking property in positions of influence and employment from Jews.
And then how it changes when 1942 and I couldn't help but think of Yann Gross's quite remarkable book called Neighbours,
where he describes the intense desire on the part of the Christian neighbours to have the Jewish property as their own.
And what is interesting is that in the Polish case, of course,
they were stood by and they were literally content to let the Jews be murdered in a bonfire, in a in a in a barn.
But this something shifts after 1942, and that's no longer the case.
And the question is, again, why? Nonetheless,
I'd like to say that it's very interesting how widespread this view of taking back jobs and positions was amongst the non-Jewish population.
I find it very clearly in my work on the Dreyfuss affair.
It's very interesting Dreyfuss life, the meritocratic whoops, that he had to get up the ranks precisely because it was proof of his achievement.
But this meritocratic approach was precisely what enraged his military colleagues.
The more as he sought to sidestep the network of patronage and common values they had invested so much time in cultivating.
So what we think of as that conclusion, as the French Way was also considered by many not to be the French way,
and it depended on what side you were on when you were assessing whether this was French or a foreign intrusion.
I'm also wondering, as I was reading, if there was an instructive parallel here between the contemporary refugee crisis in America and the family
separations that so upset people at the border in Mexico and what the public witnessed during and after Valdivia,
the belief in America. The public may feel that there is an immigration problem, but they cringe when seeing children separated from their families.
So there is a whole sort of moral renegotiation going on there.
And I'm wondering, was this similar in France? Did people feel that there was indeed a Jewish problem?
But they were uncomfortable with the roundup against families,
especially the women and children that they were forced to witness for the very reasons that you suggest men.
Okay. But isn't there something here that really goes against transgressing something deeper?
It's very hard to tell if people revise their anti-Semitic views after 1942 or merely so the resistance
to this lack of humanity as a part of an increasing resistance to not Nazi occupation and Vichy rule.
And this is a question that you that you raise. As you say, the French were indifferent, but in many ways, as you explained because of the episode,
it's everybody's known in the early act after the defeat.
It takes a long time, and then they're witnessing things that become harder to accept.
Now, the one part where I was worried about your book was, was the way you too readily threw away psychological explanation.
And you said you were trained as a psychologist.
And I saw in a former life in a former life that you asserted, and in my view, quite rightly, that notions of an altruistic or for that matter,
an authoritarian personality are too clichéd and rigid to account for the variety of actors and motivations that underpin both resistance and rescue,
depending on what you're talking about, let alone survival. Because there's other things going on there, too.
And of course, I would agree with you that any sophisticated view of motivation itself, a difficult term,
necessarily deals with the shifting dynamics of subjectivity,
the shadow and substance of every gesture, and especially the gestures of the kind that you describe,
which were spur of the moment decisions which took place in ways that are difficult to account for this so much
a lamp harvest that I think that spontaneity which which begs the question about how we begin to explain it.
And I understand why you use the term reactivity, because it gives that sense of reaction.
And yet, does this notion of social reactivity in which people, for example,
did not like Jews but came to hate the Nazis or the collaborators more were essential in leaving shifts in mentality, the implications of prejudice.
I mean, we many we have all kinds of prejudicial ideas, but they become clearer in life and death circumstances which the Nazi empire imposed.
I'll give you an extraordinary example, if you don't mind another anecdote, because we can't help but tell our stories and we should tell stories.
I have an old friend who's dead now, per Moche. He was an assumption priest and he worked for the newspaper La Cour.
He was he grew up in a tri confessional village in Alsace.
And he had he and his Palestinian mates made fun of the Jews when he returned
after the war and found that all his Jewish neighbours had been decimated.
He was devastated and he repented by learning Hebrew and reciting the Psalms in the scriptural language every day, which I find I found remarkable.
This was his penitence. But he also told me with pride that he had converted three Jews in 1993, and for him, Catholicism remained the one true faith.
And he he really did not think of himself as anti-Semitic.
But I was horrified when he told me the tale of conversion.
All like all I could think of was why did he not want the world to keep the few Jews who were left?
And, you know, I was thinking of myself, of the bubble.
And of course, he was the archivist who had shown me all the papers of the anti-Semitism of the assumption is fearlessly.
And he had done more for me than anybody else, but I was really struck.
That was his bottom line belief. And I think it's that kind of of tenacity that we have to think of when we discuss what happens to people.
Such a vision of subjectivity allows us to accept the reality of very profound contradictions
within people's psyches and to understand better the competing impulses that underpin prejudice.
Now I just want to step back and talk a bit about the larger arguments of the work.
Most important is your view that there's a disjunction between the draconian nature of Vichy anti-Semitic legislation.
And the reality on the ground.
So you talk about Morris Marris and Paxton, how it may be significant for a tiny layer at the top of Vichy of the Vichy power play.
But as you've explained in your talk library, it paints a very different picture.
And it's much more of a mosaic where the importance of the real world and the peasants is underscored.
And I think that one thing that the book for me, the most moving thing about the book is despite all this people in Paris,
the people who saved Jews were peasants and poor rural people and their working class
people who had little places in the countryside and who were able to do something,
something because of the enormity of France's underpopulated rural regions.
And they were particularly willing to help children. And we cannot deny the importance of funds in this process.
They were often paid. But does this mean that we can deny their sacrifice or misunderstand the meaning of this?
They were poor. I mean, they're coming out of the Depression and then they have this.
They've been poor for so long and they're just getting poorer.
So they couldn't have survived in the countryside if they hadn't been able to have some camouflage amongst the populace.
But it's not. It's not. There's no doubt that some of these Jewish children were exploited for labour and treated badly.
Then there are other examples where the bonds were forever.
And you have that moving case of the of the of the the court case where the rural woman wants to keep the child and.
Oh, yes, yes. And it's it's heartbreaking story. And the child wants to stay with the adopted mother.
Now, this is when I talk about religion, because I think religion matters, but not religion in any narrow sense.
It matters that Sally Age protested.
I wish he had done it earlier. And again.
Then leave is what changes it. If the German bishops had protested Protestants and Catholics, we might have had a different story.
And I'm interested in the various forms of Christian thought, whether it was inchoate,
personal ism that feeds so much into the resistance or the Protestant humanism that we see in the villages and this event.
And I wonder, even in the zone where Stanley Hoffman is in the Italians, that some that Catholicism of some kind doesn't play a role there.
But we don't know exactly.
And the latter traditions of in this event, in the Protestant places, the traditions of resisting persecution are long and memorialised.
But we can't also deny the importance of the life affirming absolutism as a means of arresting genocide.
I mean, even in Germany in the 1930s, German social workers in southern and western Germany resisted the policies of euthanasia in Catholic Germany.
And they they really dragged their feet. And we can't you know, it it's it's true that it's just for Catholics.
This kind of stuff is so difficult. And yet the church is also a tremendous contributor to anti-Semitism.
I mean, we've had I've had some friends from abroad who saw Saint John's passion as a concert.
And there's all that discussion in in the music about the perfidious Jews and these.
So it's it's this to these to these two poles that we have to see.
And I'm quoting your quote from Maguire. Oh, yeah.
Where he talks of this kind of civilizational Christianity.
And in my view, he says it all when he remarked, At what moment in history did penal colonies become prisons for the innocent?
And what other era have children been torn from their mothers and piles into cattle trucks,
as I witness this morning, this dark morning at Austerlitz Station.
And I think that those people who protested against the family separations in and in the border in Mexico, you know, those pictures,
even though some of them were not actually of children being separated from their mothers, but there was a reality of children being separated.
If you if I read The Washington Post every night because because since Trump, I've been American again, because I get upset by what's going on there.
But then they made a list of the number of pulping people who got up after the family separation and protested that in America.
I was across the board rabbis.
Priests and ministers.
And now I would just like to probe more deeply. I'm almost done, actually.
Okay. So would you argue that a pillory society like Belgium, as in Holland,
cancels out the Catholicism and muted its effects because Catholics lived among Catholics?
Was it harder to see the need to see Jews as other human beings, or was it more because of the vastness of the French countryside?
That's something I just was wondering about. I'm also interested in these rescue missions because they help the foreign Jews,
because this issue of foreign and French still is so hard to come to terms with.
Young. GROSS Again, in a lecture that I heard more than I'd say 35 years ago, said that even in the Polish resistance,
the Poles never saw that the Jews as fellow Poles and with their ghettoisation and popularisation, the Gulf was only enlarged.
They looked like the beggars and the homeless on the streets.
So there was no there was that that to them there was a dynamic of repulsion and pity, but none of fraternity.
I mean, how does that happen in Poland? Even the Communists had the little fellow feeling for the Jews.
There was no relationship to them. Now I'd like to think more about the Republican tradition.
It's important that they enrol children in school, as in Denmark.
It's important that schoolteachers make connections with saving organisations.
But it still leaves aside this thing about people who are, quote, not French.
The Republic was also responsible for social welfare, and I do believe that the saving of French Jews had some relationship to Republicanism.
If there was the memory, especially of the union sack, which was still powerful,
especially for Jewish servicemen when their bravery was so was recognised.
But I also say that this the way you talk about French Republicanism is is very static and quite monolithic.
Wasn't it also stained by defeat and decadence and the fact that the Jews were much pitied during the revolution?
Yes, but that's a long time ago. And the status of Jews and relationship to Jews is very variable all through the 19th century.
Aren't the subjective motivations for supporting the Republic as multiple as the gradations in the forms of anti-Semitism?
This shifts very, very readily, and this is not so much a criticism as a provocation to thought.
I what I really wanted to conclude with is to say that we by looking at the Holocaust historically, we don't relative ize it.
And I think that that tendency to see it in those in that way has made it very difficult to to think about it and to make it more concrete,
surprisingly. And for me, that's the greatest lesson that the book teaches.
Thank you. Very much.
Robert. Well, thank you very much, Jack, and thank you very much.
Also, Ruth, I'm going to start off by talking about why I think this is a wonderful book that I'm going to talk a bit about sources and then I'm going
to talk finally about what we need to think about in terms of the picture we have or might have of France under the German occupation.
So why is this a great book? I mean, the first thing is that you you you also you tackle a major historical question,
which is why was it that 75% of the Jews of thoughts were saved?
That a really important question and you've tackled it head on.
Secondly, I like your use of sources. You say that you use quantitative and qualitative sources.
I love the maps. I'm great friends for maps, as you know, but I'm also a fan of oral history and I love the way you use witness accounts,
the interviews you've done yourself to trace individual family biographies.
Perhaps most important, you invite us to rewrite or reconsider the dominant narratives of resistance and occupation.
One of the things I say in my book, my recent book on resistance,
is that there's a kind of switch in the late in the 1990s and subsequent income considering from having a rather old fashioned view of resistance,
which is military, masculine and national, which goes back to the girl tapping a much more interested rescue,
which is more which is humanitarian, which involves many more women and which is also more international.
So you you know, I cite that in my book as a contribution that you've made to the debate.
You also ask us to think differently about occupied France, much less about, you know, you know,
to challenge the picture we have in France on the occupation that we've got from the shop and IP chair from.
And and you know, you say that we need to think about sympathy, mutual aid, complicity,
these little gestures you quote, you say you to your interviewees, we felt protected by the local people.
You also and this this this is this is extremely brave, if not foolhardy.
You ask us to reconsider the role of Vichy.
We use this expression administrative schizophrenia.
So you say on the one hand, Vichy was segregated Jews initiated exploitation of Jews.
But you also talk about the way in which officials, some officials, helped Jews or the second nationality to salvage social status.
I mean all are you talked about the white division didn't come off as it but it because of complicity from the police and so on.
So in your story, you know, the recount the the the French would cover that as Republicans, as patriots and as Christians.
However, all the question of sources, your book is very different from things I discovered when I was working on Marion in Chains 20 years ago.
And I just want to cite a few alternative case.
So for example, you cite the case of Stanley Hoffman, which is very powerful,
but he is he's a he is someone who is not, is is or was naturally grateful to those who to hit him and his family.
But there's another case now. This used to be a subtext to the Cold War second year subject.
I don't know which to this Paul Steinberg speech you also which was which came out
in French his chronic diarrhoea which is which you cite in your bibliography.
So he was born in Berlin in 1926. His mother died when he was a child.
His is his father was of Russian Jewish origin.
He talks about being bundled around from country to country.
And then after he says he says after the relative roundups and friend of the family, Madam Lucien, tried to get a present family.
Normally I take him, but three days later they told him not to be seen.
They could not run, quote, they could not run the risk of letting me stay for fear of upsetting the commander until.
So he survived Auschwitz and he returned to that Normandy village in the 1950s, quote, to express his everlasting contempt.
So that's another and that's another that's another study.
But just a few just a few things that I found in the archives when I was working on Marian.
So Ruth talked about how the French, you know, didn't have much compunction about taking back jobs and positions.
A man called Eduardo, the owner of the Cafe de la Ville.
And so Miron wrote to the prefect, the sub prefect of Somalia, on the 55th of November 1942, to say, quote, the Jews now plaza had.
Not yet put up his Jewish business, saw him at his bar hotel.
Quote, he says, I don't want proof that Mr. Chanel is is Jewish.
But when he welcomes Jews, he says they all belong to the great family.
I even told Mr. Share snip that he was a dirty Jew, a socialist, but he did not reply.
One of the things that most struck me you talk about.
So when when Jewish businesses were realised, as they put it, that these local these commissioners were charged with overseeing the sterilisation.
And what struck me was the huge price tag that these people had about people who wanted to buy up Jewish businesses.
And I just shot you cite you one by the Grecia of Paris writes to the the prefect of La Atlantic 20th December 1941, asking him what they had,
the hotels, boarding houses and shops in the in the North Somerset level area because she was quite keen to lay a hands on them.
Now we talked a lot about the change of opinion, the mass deportations, 1942, the fact that people were shocked.
But again, I just want to show you one document. There was a case of 116 Jews being held being held for three days in October 1942, in the coliseum.
Now, also before they were deported to the policy announcements and in the archives,
there's a there's a there's an invoice from a mr. Dupré, who was the manager of the cafe opposite the seminary.
He submitted a bill to the prefect for 12,200 francs for meals he had provided for the inmates as he had a living to make.
So I'm happy that, you know, some people were shocked by the deportations produced.
Other people were, you know, making money out of it.
And last but the last the last point about about religion and the bishops, I you know, these bishops from the southern zone are wonderful.
But in the northern zone, in the desert occupying, they weren't bothered at all.
There was a protest by the bishops in the occupied zone on June day, 9th of April 1943.
But it was a protest against people being sent still.
It wasn't a protest against Jews being deported.
And I think one of the things that you pick up is that there's a sense that, you know, the Jews have got problems,
but everyone else has got very bloody problems with being sent on to go and all the rest of it.
So what picture do we have of the occupation? I mean, your story, you know, gives us this gives us I mean, what I wrote my own in chains.
I said, well, you know, there are there are three kinds of French people in the literature.
There's the good French, the bad French and the poor French.
And I wanted to write about the poor French, the people in the middle.
But you're writing very much about about the good French. And it's a story of mutual aid, solidarity, generosity that that we have.
But when I when I sort of rewind to where I where I was when I wrote my in chains,
this to me was what struck me was this was a country suffering from the trauma of defeat and occupation as a result of defeat.
They were they immediately got into scapegoating. Who was responsible for this?
Was it the Jews? Was it the Communists? Was it the Freemasons? Was it the labour movement?
They became very suspicious of and hostile to foreigners and immigrants.
I think this may be a fact of why, as you say, you know, French Jews survived in much,
much greater numbers than foreign Jews because foreign Jews in the end,
with regard to the immigrants, there's a link between antisemitism into the phobia, as you as you say.
One of the things that struck me was under the occupation as a kind of narrowing of the horizons that people can't think about,
you know, the national interest or about what's going on.
Well, you know, they they they their interest shrinks to their job, their family, their community.
It's it's sort of shock. And, of course, what and so that, you know, there are stories of generosity,
but there are also, as you say, stories about in the form of letters of denunciation.
You talk about there was also this question of money.
And I think and I think, you know, you talked about how it helped that Jewish people have financial resources.
As you say, Promontory must not be forgotten. Do you have a section of your material?
But one of the things that strikes me as one of the one of the questions that needs to be asked is, you know, when, for example,
people helped, you know, smugglers helped Jews over the frontier to Spain or to, you know, or to Spain, Spain, Austria.
And what you did, they do this out of the out of the goodness of their hearts, or were they,
in effect, people traffickers who were who were cashing in on the on the on the Jews predicament?
On the last point, I suppose this is your your your your your main argument.
And I think it's. It's very important.
We need to consider this is how the survival of the Jews depends on every day, every day French people lending them a helping hand from time to time.
But I suppose there are two things. One is. To what extent were the Jews protected and to what extent did they protect themselves?
So there are these Jewish organisations, the OSI, the Jewish Scouts.
So the days of the caravan of adage of the past that you cite.
But again, if we if we if we go back to the Van Diem, you know,
you talked about why the building didn't succeed either because of the communist leverage, because of negotiations, because of the police.
The deputy demo who's who's archive you cite talks about how you know when they got news of this
they had to they had their Yiddish newspaper and with that and with knocking on people's doors,
they alerted them to to to the fact that the police were about to descend so that, you know,
there is a kind of Jewish self-help thing, which is really important when you talk about forgers.
I can't I can't remember the name of of of the young boy of Russian Jewish origin who goes from NIS to the Shlomo in the square.
And he had a Russian origin from originally he died a couple of years ago.
I met him. Becomes a friend of Yaakov. Yeah. So he's he's a young Jewish boy who is is a is a is a super forger.
So, you know, some forgers are area, but many, you know, also forgers are Jewish.
And then also the last point is resistance was also a way of surviving.
Well, resistance. So I'll just give you the example of all.
I mean, so anything that talks about this in her book, home visits are usually fake.
This is still something else communist. You know, there are a lot of she calls them resourceful Jew love.
So a lot of the a lot of the Jewish kids in Paris whose parents were rounded up, they they they make a beeline for the southern zone.
They go to they are they go to movies.
They get involved in resistance organisations, if and Moye groups and, you know, and these groups do provide them with protection as well as them.
So they, so they do resist very often with a great cost to their lives.
But, you know, so I think I think resistance also has to be considered as a as a way of survival.
Now, just I suppose, just to conclude in a sense,
that the debates that we we're having is whether the bottle whether the glass is half empty or half full.
Calypso, when you introduced this, you know, you talk about rays of rays of light, you know, in the darkest darkness.
And I suppose the question is how how bright of these rates of light?
You know, to me, the rays of light are quite, quite weak and projective rays of light of rather a rather powerful.
So I think and and you say you said that you don't want to look at this the occupation through rose coloured spectacles, and neither do I.
So I think the discussion is, you know, where where do we stand on this spectrum?
Because I think you're one of the people at the other end. Where do we you know, where are we going to end up?
Right. Thank you. Record.