In a vividly narrated reexamination of the historical record,
Zuccotti (History/Barnard; Italians and the Holocaust, 1987) tells
the horrifying story of the fate of French Jews at the hands of the
Nazis and their Vichy collaborators. With its egalitarian legacy
from the French Revolution, France was traditionally one of
Europe's most enlightened societies in extending civil rights to
Jews. But beneath this tradition, Zuccotti says, lay a deeper, more
ancient one of anti-Semitism, which surfaced in modern times during
the Dreyfus affair (1895) and at other moments of crisis for
France. After its fall to Germany in 1940, France was divided into
an occupied zone and the nominally independent Vichy Republic. In
both regions, Zuccotti says, French bureaucrats and police
cooperated with the Nazis in implementing laws to identify and
segregate Jews - with French police, for example, interning Jews in
camps established by Vichy officials in the unoccupied zone. In
policies that affected both French and foreign Jews, the Nazis -
with official French assistance - rounded up thousands in the
occupied zone: Zuccotti emphasizes the terrifying roundup in Paris
on July 16, 1942, which began the systematic deportation and
destruction of Jews in France. By autumn 1942, those interned in
the Vichy Republic were being delivered on a large scale to the
Nazis. The author records disparate French attitudes toward the
arrests, ranging from indifference or malicious satisfaction to
sympathy and support for the victims. Indeed, French apathy (which
contrasted with widespread, active anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe)
may have been responsible for the relatively high survival rate (76
percent) of Jews in France. Zuccotti also dwells on the courage of
relief organizations and of individual Protestant and Catholic
workers (as opposed to many in the Church hierarchy, who supported
Vichy) who hid and sheltered thousands throughout the country. A
balanced yet heartrending contribution to Holocaust literature.
(Kirkus Reviews)
Many recent books have documented the collaboration of the French
authorities with the anti-Jewish German policies of World War II.
Yet about 76 percent of France's Jews survived-more than in almost
any other country in Western Europe. How do we explain this
phenomenon? Certainly not by looking at official French policy, for
the Vichy government began preparing racial laws even before the
German occupiers had decreed such laws. To provide a full answer to
the question of how so many French Jews survived, Susan Zuccotti
examines the response of the French people to the Holocaust.
Drawing on memoirs, government documents, and personal interviews
with survivors, she tells the stories of ordinary and extraordinary
French men and women. Zuccotti argues that the French reaction to
the Holocaust was not as reprehensible as it has been portrayed.
Susan Zuccotti teaches modern European history at Barnard College
and Columbia University. She is the author of The Italians and the
Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, and Survival (Nebraska 1996), which
won the National Jewish Book Award in 1987.
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