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RESEARCH
AND
DOCUMENTATION:
RECONSTRUCTING THE
CONVOY
LISTS
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The main resource for this children's memorial book
is the information published in Le Mémorial de la Déportation
des Juifs de France (1978). The children's names and birth dates and places
have been brought together from the 1978 Mémorial, with their addresses
at the moment they were arrested. But the text of this book – and most
particularly the convoy deportation lists – rests on years of careful
study of a mass of documentation from many sources, some of it gathered with
great difficulty. The lists were not simply copied from an existing source.
The challenge of the 1978 Mémorial was to recapture as
closely as possible precise information on each of the more than 76,700 Jewish
deportees from France, both adults and children. Our goal was to fill in as
many blanks as possible about dates and places of birth, to establish the
deportees' last known addresses – usually the places where they were
arrested – and the assembly centers where they were sent before
deportation. The starting point of that research was the lists of deportees'
names made at the time the convoys were assembled.
Seventy-five major
convoys deported Jews from France to the East between March 27, 1942, and
August 22, 1944, most going directly to Auschwitz. Sixty-three of the
transports left from Drancy, on the outskirts of Paris. Eight left from
Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, the camps in the Loiret Department; one each
from Compiègne, Lyons, and Angers; and a last small convoy from
Clermont-Ferrand.
The Drancy secretariat, composed of Jewish internees
temporarily exempt from deportation, furnished commanders of the convoy escorts
with three copies of the final deportation list, and these went with the train.
The secretariat kept at least two copies of each list, the better of the two
for use by the Drancy camp's administration and the other for the Jewish
Affairs Department of the Gestapo in Paris.
After the Liberation, one
set of original carbon copies for 69 of the convoy lists came into the
possession of the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (CDJC; the
Contemporary Jewish Documentation Center). The CDJC had been created by the
Jewish community in 1943 in Grenoble to document as well as possible the
persecution of the Jews. In August 1944, when Paris was liberated, the Ministry
of Veterans and War Victims was given what are believed to be the Drancy
secretariat convoy lists (examples:
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FRENCH
CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST A memorial
Serge Klarsfeld
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Page 107 |
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