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While they ruled, the Italian
occupation authorities in the south of France even prevented French
administrators from stamping the word "Jew" on our identity papers.
At
moments when we did feel the danger of arrest around us, we also felt the
active solidarity of many French people, both secular and religious people, who
held out their hands to us, knowing the situation in which we found ourselves
and who we really were.
And much later, when I began to struggle
against the immunity enjoyed by the German criminals responsible for the Final
Solution in France, it was, first of all, Germans who gave me firm support
– that of my wife being the most precious and effective. And then a
generation of sons and daughters of the Jewish deportees of France involved
themselves in our work. It is to their support that we owe the convictions of
the German criminals, the indictments of their French accomplices, and the
change in attitudes of French society, particularly our youth, toward the guilt
of the Vichy government.
The Gestapo wanted to destroy all traces of
the existence of its Jewish victims. Whatever personal papers Jews carried with
them were destroyed on their arrival at extermination centers – at the
same time that most of the victims themselves were destroyed. Those who
survived the "selection" for work or death on the arrival ramps were registered
and tattooed with a serial number that became their entire concentration camp
identity. Furthermore, total destruction of the archives of the extermination
of millions of human beings was anticipated in case of a Nazi defeat. This
included the documents recording Jews' arrivals in the camps, and in particular
their camp registration cards. Ultimately, in fact, most of these documents
were burned. We should always remember the declaration of Heinrich Himmler to
SS leaders about the Final Solution: "It is a glorious page that will never be
written."
In France, the Gestapo and French police administrators used
arrested Jews' identity papers to create registration files at Drancy and in
the camps in Loiret, Compiègne, and other places, and to make up the
deportation lists. The act of recording was misleading, since the final goal of
the process was total disappearance of the deportees. And whatever outcome for
Germany, victory or defeat, these files and other French archives on the arrest
and internment of Jews were destined to be kept secret. This is the traditional
rule in France if documents risk creating problems or causing embarrassment for
the generation that lived through the events. For example, at the Liberation,
the Prefecture of Police in Paris destroyed almost all its voluminous archives
on arrests of Jews, and in addition quietly transferred the family and
individual files from the Prefecture's Jewish registry, and files on Jews
arrested in Paris, to the Ministry of Veterans and War Victims Affairs.
At the Liberation, a true balance sheet of the catastrophe experienced
by Judaism in France would not have been possible if Jews had not taken
responsibility for their history into their own hands. This happened first at
Drancy, where those responsible for the camp registers conscientiously saved
them and the deportation lists they possessed and turned them over to the new
French authority, which would become the Ministry of Veterans and War Victims.
As it happened, that organization would jealously guard these documents
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FRENCH
CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST A memorial
Serge Klarsfeld
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Page XIII |
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