The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (20 page)

In October 1939 Ringelblum had begun to document systematically the fate befalling the Jews of Poland. Others soon joined, and the group adopted the code name Oneg Shabat (Sabbath rejoicing), as its meetings usually took place on Saturday afternoons. In May 1940, the structure of the group was finalized and a secretary, Hersch Wasser, appointed to coordinate the effort. Paradoxically, once the ghetto was closed, the activities of Oneg Shabat expanded: “We reached the conclusion,” Ringelblum noted, “that the Germans took very little interest in what the Jews were doing amongst themselves…. The Jewish Gestapo agents were busy looking for the rich Jews with hoarded goods, smugglers, etc. Politics interested them little…. In conditions of such “freedom” among the slaves of the ghetto it was not surprising that the work of Oneg Shabat could develop successfully.”
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Like so many other Jewish chroniclers of those days, the members of Oneg Shabat—whether they sensed it during this early phase of their work or not—were assembling the materials for the history of their own end.

The small voice of twelve-year-old Dawid Rubinowicz, the youngest of the diarists, had none of the widely shared sense of urgency nor did his notes aim at systematic chronicling. And yet in their simple, unassuming, and straightforward entries, Rubinowicz’s five school exercise books reveal an unusual facet of Jewish life in the General Government between March 1940 and June 1942, that of a quasipeasant family of five (Dawid had a brother and sister) living in Krajno, a village near Bodzentyn, in the Kielce district. The father had bought a piece of land, then a dairy. When Dawid started writing, the Rubinowiczes still owned one cow (it is not clear from the text whether they ever owned more than one).
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Dawid’s first entry, on March 21, 1940, mentioned a new decree: “Early in the morning I went through the village in which we live. From a distance I saw a notice on the shop wall. I quickly went up to read it. The new notice said that Jews may under no circumstances travel on vehicles” [the railway had long been forbidden].
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It was thus on foot that, on April 4, the boy went to Kielce: “I got up earlier today because I had to go to Kielce. I left after breakfast. It was sad following the paths across the fields all by myself. After four hours I was in Kielce. When I went into Uncle’s house I saw them all sitting so sad, and I learned that Jews from various streets are being deported [into a ghetto] and I also grew sad. In the evening I went out into the street to get something.”
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In his matter-of-fact way Dawid noted the small events of his daily life and other occurrences whose significance he may or may not have understood. On August 5, 1940, he wrote: “Yesterday the local government officer came to the mayor of our village and said all Jews with families must go and register at the rural district offices. By 7 o’clock in the morning we were at the village offices. We were there for several hours because the grown-ups were electing the Council of Jewish elders. Then we went home.”
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On September 1, the first anniversary of the outbreak of the war, Dawid mused about suffering and the widespread unemployment: “Take us,” he wrote. “We used to have a dairy and now we’re utterly unemployed. There is only very little stock left from before the war; we’re still using it up, but it’s already running out, and then we don’t know what we’ll do.”
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“Wherever one looks there is filth, and the Jews themselves are full of filth,” Wehrmacht private E, stationed somewhere in former Poland, informed his family on November 17, 1940. “It is really comical: The Jews all salute us, although we don’t respond and aren’t allowed to. They swing their caps down to the ground. In fact, the greeting is not compulsory, but is a remnant from SS times; that’s how they trained the Jews. When one looks at these people, one gets the impression, that they really have no justification for living on God’s earth. You must have seen this with your own eyes, otherwise you cannot believe it.”
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In August 1940 Cpl. WW was been stationed near the demarcation line with the Soviet Union; he too had something to write home about the Jews: “Here, in this town (Siedlce), there are 40,000 inhabitants, of whom 30,000 are Jews. Half the houses have been destroyed by the Russians. The Jews lie on the street like pigs, as becomes a ‘chosen people.’…Wherever we serve our Great German fatherland, we are proud to be able to help the Führer. Only in many generations will the greatness of these times be recognized. But we all want to stand before History, full of pride, as having also done our duty.”
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In March 1941 Cpl. LB summed up the situation of the Jewish population in his own area of Poland: “Here, one deals with the Jews and [you should see] how the SS takes care of these swine…. They would like to take off their armbands, not to be recognized as Jews. But then they receive quite a reminder from the SS and become very small, these Jew-pigs.”
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VII

A month after signing the armistice, seven days after the demise of the Third Republic, Marshal Pétain’s new regime, on its own initiative, introduced its first anti-Jewish measure. One hundred fifty years after the emancipation of the Jews of France, the rollback had started.

Of the approximately 330,000 Jews in prewar France almost half were either foreigners or born of foreign parents. And among the foreigners 55,000 had arrived between 1933 and 1939 (40,000 since 1935).
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While anti-Semitism had been part of the French ideological landscape throughout the nineteenth century, first on the left, then—increasingly so—on the conservative and the radical right, it was the Dreyfus affair that turned it into a central issue of French politics in the 1890s and throughout the turn of the century. Yet World War I brought a significant decrease in anti-Jewish incitement (contrary to what occurred in Germany), and the immediate postwar years seemed to herald a new stage in the assimilation of native French Jewry into surrounding society. The “
Israélites français
” had found their rightful place as one of the
familles spirituelles
that were part and parcel of France.
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The resurgence of a vociferous anti-Semitism from the early 1930s on was due to the presence of a deep-rooted anti-Jewish tradition (even if dormant for a few years), to a series of financial-political scandals in which some Jews were conspicuously implicated (the Stavisky affair, among others), to the rising “threat” of the Popular Front (a coalition of Left and Center Left parties) led by the Jewish socialist Léon Blum—and to Blum’s brief government—to the influence of Nazi agitation
and
to the massive immigration of foreign Jews. A new sense of unease among the native Jews turned them against their non-French “brethren,” whom they accused of endangering their own position. From then on, more forcefully than ever before, the native Jews—although they did set up an assistance organization for the refugees—insisted on establishing a clear dividing line between themselves and the newcomers.

During the months that preceded the war, the French government seriously considered the possibility of integrating Jewish and other refugees into that most sacred of national institutions, the army, by creating special foreigners’ units (distinct from the Foreign Legion) to fight in the French ranks. Most of the foreigners were more than ready to join the campaign against Hitler’s Germany. But almost as soon as the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed, a sharp reversal took place: Refugees, whether communists or not, Jews or not, were suddenly suspects; the hysterical fear of a “fifth column” turned eager anti-Nazis into potential enemies. Their place wasn’t in the army but in internment camps.
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A law of November 18, 1939, ordered the internment of people “dangerous to national defense.” At the end of the same month some twenty thousand foreigners, among whom were many Jewish German (or Austrian) male refugees, were sent to camps or camplike facilities. Over the following weeks most of the internees were released, once their anti-Nazi credentials had been checked.
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Their freedom was cut short, however, by the German attack in the west. As described by the Jewish German writer Lion Feuchtwanger, the new government order was read over the radio: “All German nationals residing in the precincts of Paris, men and women alike, and all persons between the ages of seventeen and fifty-five who were born in Germany but who are without German citizenship, are to report for internment.”
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In fact the measure applied to the whole country, and thus, once more, thousands of Jewish and other refugees from Hitler were assembled at Le Vernet, Les Milles, Gurs, Rivesaltes, Compiègne, and other camps at the very moment when the Germans shattered the French defenses. Some of the internees managed to escape the trap. Others never did: For them the road to death began in the French camps in the spring of 1940.

As France disintegrated, about 100,000 Jews joined the 8 to 10 million people fleeing southward in the utter chaos and panic of
“la débâcle.”
They had been preceded by some 15,000 Jews from Alsace-Lorraine and about 40,000 Jews from Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg.
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Overall the catastrophe was perceived in national terms; its specific Jewish aspect was as yet no more than a vague anxiety about the possibility of dire changes.

On July 10 the French Republic scuttled itself; a massive vote of both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate granted Pétain full executive powers. In the nonoccupied zone of the country, the eighty-three-year-old marshal became the leader of an authoritarian regime in which he was both head of state and head of government. Vichy, a small spa city in the Allier department, at the geographical center of the country, was chosen as the capital of the new state. The motto of the État Français,
Travail, Famille, Patrie
(Work, Family, Fatherland) replaced that of the republic:
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.

Most of the hard-core French admirers of Nazism and militant anti-Semites stayed in Paris. Vichy was too conservative for them, too clerical, too timid, too hesitant in its subservience to Germany and its struggle against the Jews. This extremist fringe did not recognize any limits. The writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline demanded an alliance with Germany, in his view a racially kindred country: “France,” he proclaimed, “is Latin only by chance, through a fluke, through defeat…it is Celtic, three-quarters Germanic…. Are we afraid of absorption? We shall never be more absorbed than we are right now. Are we to remain slaves of Jews, or shall we become Germanic once more?”
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Though Céline’s anarcho-nazism, like his anti-Semitic style, was
sui generis
in many ways, his hatred of Jews was shared by a noisy phalanx of writers, journalists, and public figures of all ilks; it was spewed day in, day out, week after week, by an astonishingly high number of newspapers and periodicals with anti-Semitism as their core message. (On the eve of the war forty-seven such publications systematically spread anti-Jewish propaganda.)
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“Finish with the Jews!” Lucien Rebatet titled an article in
Le Cri du peuple
on December 6, 1940: The Jews were bugs, rats, “but much more harmful”; yet, as they were human bipeds, “we do not demand their extermination.” They should be driven out of Europe, punished, and so on.
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Worse was to come. Anti-Jewish rage found organized political expression in a series of collaborationist parties such as Jacques Doriot’s Parti Populaire Français (PPF), Marcel Déat’s Rassemblement National Populaire (RNP), and Charles Maurras’ Action Française.
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Strident collaborationism was rarely heard in Vichy during the summer of 1940, but traditional native anti-Semitism was rife from the very first days. After reporting on August 16, 1940, about an expulsion campaign from Vichy, on orders of the new government, the American chargé d’affaires in Pétain’s capital, Robert Murphy, added: “There is no question that one of its objectives [of the campaign] is to cause the departure of Jews. These, Laval [the deputy prime minister] told me recently, were congregating in Vichy to an alarming extent. He believed they would foment trouble and give the place a bad name. He said he would get rid of them.”
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Vichy’s first anti-Jewish decree was issued on July 17. The new law limited civil service appointments to citizens born of a French father. On July 22 a commission, chaired by Justice Minister Raphael Alibert, started checking all post-1927 naturalizations.
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On August 27, Vichy repealed the Marchandeau Law of April 21, 1939, which forbade incitement on racial or religious grounds: The floodgates of anti-Semitic propaganda reopened. On August 16 a National Association of Physicians was established, whose members had to be born of French fathers. On September 10 the same limitation was applied to the legal profession.
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And, on October 3, 1940, Vichy, again of its own initiative, issued its
Statut des Juifs
(Jewish Statute.)

In the opening paragraph of the statute, a Jew was defined as any person descending from at least three grandparents of the “Jewish race,” or of two grandparents of the “Jewish race” if the spouse too was Jewish (the German definition referred to the grandparents’ religion; the French, to their race). The next paragraphs listed all the public functions from which Jews were barred. Paragraph 5 excluded Jews from all positions of ownership or responsibility in the press, theater, and film. The statute, drafted under Alibert’s supervision, was signed by Pétain and by all the members of his cabinet. The next day, October 4, a law allowed the internment of foreign Jews in special camps, if the administration of their department so decided. A commission responsible for these camps was established. The same regional administration could also compel foreign Jews to reside in places defined by the authorities.
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