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essential to identifying the victim, and would never
release copies, not even to the Center for Contemporary Jewish
Documentation(CDJC). The precious CDJC, created in 1943 by the Jewish
community, is the institutional memory of the fate of France's Jews during the
Holocaust.
Fortunately, the CDJC, acting quite illegally but with full
legitimacy, seized and guarded the archives of the Jewish Affairs Service of
the Gestapo in France. These archives did not include a copy of the Drancy
register, but they did contain the carbon copies of most convoy lists, made at
the time of the deportations. Without these documents, which have been made
accessible to researchers, historians, journalists, and citizens, it would have
been impossible to students, reconstruct exactly what happened to the Jews in
France during the Second World War.
Other documents have been released
over time, often as a result of our lawsuits. I won access to the archives of
the trials of German criminals by French military courts; the records of the
Vichy Interior Ministry's delegation in German-occupied France; and the
archives of the Paris Prefecture of Police, the Ministry of Veterans and War
Victims, and the camps of the Loiret region. Some documents are held by other
institutions, including the Union Générale des Israelites de
France(UGIF) archives at the YIVO Institute in New York, and many at the Yad
Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. The archives at these institutions and
elsewhere have been used to prepare a series of reference works on the fate of
French Jews during the war.
The first of these works was the 1978
volume Le Mémorial de la Déportation des Juifs de France
(published in English by the Klarsfeld Foundation in 1983 as The
Memorial to the Jews Deported from France). That work contains name, birth
date, nationality, and deportation convoy for each of the 75,700 Jews deported
from France. It was the culmination of a lengthy research effort to restore to
the victims their dignity by identifying each one. In fact, until we found and
reconstructed all the convoy deportation lists to create the Memorial,
there had been no agreement even on how many Jewish victims there were.
Thirty-six years after the Final Solution was put in motion, this work thwarted
efforts to conceal or minimize the work of the Nazi executioners and their
Vichy accomplices.
The Mémorial had a profound impact.
Despite some errors – for example, incorrect spellings – names were
usually recognized by surviving members of a family. Many learned for the first
time the details of the deportation and death of their vanished relatives from
the book's histories of the convoys from Drancy and other French camps. In
addition, the research helped document the crimes of Kurt Lischka, and Herbert
Hagen, and Ernst Heinrichsohn, Gestapo leaders for France and the cities of
Paris and Bordeaux, who were only then being tried and convicted by a German
court in Cologne.
The publication of the Mémorial in
1978, listing the names of all Jews then known to have been deported to their
deaths from France, generated an immense shock in the French Jewish community.
Typed out from the original deportation lists, convoy by convoy, the names,
addresses, and birth dates and places were like an electric current in
mobilizing the community to confront its past. Now that the
Mémorial has been out of print for more than five years, I am
often
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FRENCH
CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST A memorial
Serge Klarsfeld
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Page XIV |
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