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Queen Victoria's prime to babies born behind French
barbed wire, appeared on the lists. Some of these families were deported
together. Others were split so that children separated from their parents were
forced to make the horrific journey uncomforted by loved ones. "In spite of our
own domestic happiness," Serge wrote in his preface, "we often wept when
confronted with the images which loomed from these lists full of children's
names."
Though primarily meant as an act of "piety and homage" to the
victims, the Mémorial also functioned as legal evidence. Its text
explicated the deportation machinery in France, named its German operatives and
French collaborators, and catalogued their official telegrams and internal
memos. Introduced at the Cologne trial, this book was consulted by the judges
and helped to convict the three defendants, Lischka, Heinrichson, and Hagen.
Long after assuming they were quite literally "home free," this trio went to
jail.
The Mémorial, published in an American edition in
1983 and now out of print, seemed definitive to all but Serge Klarsfeld. He
resisted requests to reprint it, choosing, rather, to build on it and further
advance the restoration of memory. The result is the book in your hands. The
world knows the face of Anne Frank. Here are the faces of 2,500 children, under
age 18, all but a tiny fraction soon to be killed. There's a depthless quality
to the children's memorial. No matter how often I open it to a random page, it
seems there's always a new face, solemn or smiling, that I'd missed, as from a
luminous spring burbling up from a dark source. Each time, with the same
fragile optimism, I out check convoy number, hoping it's a later one from 1944,
allowing for the slight chance that the child survived if he or she was old
enough to be selected for slave labor. Far more likely, the convoy falls in
that dreadful summer and fall of 1942, following the mass arrests of Jews in
both Occupied and Vichy France, when more than half of these children were
deported. From that time, almost no child survived.
A cold silence once
enveloped Vichy's crimes. It would be broken, Serge Klarsfeld once predicted,
by the actions of the sons and daughters of deportees. That silence, early on,
was total. Consider the publication in 1947 of Our Vichy Gamble, by
William Langer, Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard University. In this
major study of the U.S.-Vichy diplomacy, not a single mention is made of the
state's anti-Jewish laws, arrests, incarceration, and delivery of victims for
deportation, nor even that Vichy had a commissioner of Jewish Affairs. Jews do
not exist in Langer's portrayal of Vichy. It is a long way from that vacuum to
the publication of this book.
It is invidious to single out any one
image from the children's memorial for attention. Still, I must point to one
that strikingly shows how incomprehensible was the prospect of Holocaust to
Jews in France. It's the Kogan family's 1941 New Year's card from Paris,
featuring a photo of baby Marceline and offering the wish that 1942 will be a
"good year." How to imagine that it would be the year in which Marceline and
her mother would be arrested, deported, and murdered at Auschwitz?
The
Klarsfelds have always placed an emphasis on the deported children. To me, that
emphasis was puzzling. Why single any group when all met the same end? Then I
became a parent, as the Klarsfelds already
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FRENCH
CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST A memorial
Serge Klarsfeld
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