by Anne Nelson
The couple had a fallback plan to meet at the Tuileries garden, but he was sure all was lost. As he approached the park he saw a little boy playing in a sandbox under the benevolent gaze of some German soldiers. Fearful it was an illusion, Rayski drew near. It was his son, filling and emptying his sand bucket, as Jeanne and a friend chatted quietly on a bench nearby. “Are children born with a natural instinct for clandestine life?” he wondered.
The previous night, Jeanne had arrived home at curfew to find her neighbors huddled in the yard. The concierge, whose husband was a policeman, had told them the raid was imminent, but, given the curfew, they didn’t know what to do. Would the police just take the men? Then it would be better to put the children to bed. Would they take women and children too? How could they find hiding places in time? It might be better to keep their families together.
Jeanne didn’t wait for the end of the debate. She ran to her apartment and threw some belongings into a bag. As she rushed out the door, she caught sight of the yellow star on her jacket. She ripped it off, but the fabric beneath still showed the outline. She clutched her toddler over her left side to cover it.
She convinced a hotelier to let them stay the night. He wouldn’t allow her to pay for the room. “Keep your money,” he said. “It’s shameful to see this. Be careful.”
Jeanne hoped her husband would keep their date in the Tuileries. Until then, she stayed in the Métro as long as she could, trying to comfort her hungry child with a piece of a baguette she had taken from the kitchen.
After she told her husband what had happened, Jeanne burst into sobs. Rayski waited for her reproaches but they never came. Jeanne left Benoît with a teacher nearby, and the couple spent the night together in Rayski’s room. From time to time she trembled in her sleep, and he put his hand over her mouth to keep her from crying out.
The next morning they conferred. “Benoît will be safer in the country,” she said. “Then I’ll be free, and I can be a courier.” They sought out Léon Chertok, who seemed to know everyone. Rayski had frowned on Chertok’s bourgeois background and indifference to the Communist Party. Now these were the qualities that could save his son’s life. Chertok had Protestant friends in a tiny hamlet in Deux-Sèvres called Noirvault. They would hide Benoît.24
Chertok had experienced his own ordeal. He had spent the previous night at the home of the Catala sisters, the friends who had lent him their late brother’s identity. When he went out that morning, he found “an atrocious drama, because they had taken the children, and because it was the French police who had done the ‘job.’ ”25
The French police were instructed to take families with children between the ages of two and twelve to the Vel d’Hiv bicycle stadium. Others, including teenagers, individual adults, and childless couples, were routed to Drancy pending deportation. Outside the stadium, city buses disgorged thousands of confused passengers clutching their suitcases and blankets. The police processed their papers as they entered, keeping meticulous records. Rayski joined Chertok outside, not daring to approach the building. But they had to know what was going on inside, and Rayski asked Chertok to find a non-Jewish friend to breach the premises and report on conditions. Once again, he turned to the Catala sisters, who had acquired forged credentials as social workers.
It was said that the early hours were calm; adults talked quietly as children scampered around the bicycle track. But by the time the Catala sisters arrived, it was pandemonium. Over the course of the first day 11,363 Jews had been arrested, and the second day brought another 1,521. By the end, the police had arrested 12,884 people, only 3,031 of whom were grown men.26
The Catala sisters found the environment “horrible, demoniacal, something that grabs you by the throat and keeps you from screaming.” The overcrowded glass-roofed stadium had become an inferno in the July sun. Toilets were blocked and overflowing. Children and adults received scant rations of food and water, and hysteria set in. The sisters heard people screaming “Kill us, but don’t leave us here!” and “I beg you, give me a lethal injection!”
The authorities admitted three doctors and a few nurses to attend to over twelve thousand people, including sick children, typhoid patients, and pregnant women.27 “The medical staff didn’t know where to turn,” the sisters reported.
The lack of water paralyzed us completely, and obliged us to totally neglect hygiene. We feared an epidemic. Not a single German! They were right. They would have been torn to pieces. What cowards to let the French do their dirty work!28
Not every uniformed Frenchman behaved shamefully. Captain Henri Pierret, chief of the Paris Fire Department, was ordered to report to the Vel d’Hiv. He was surprised to find the site cordoned off by legions of French police officers and plainclothesmen. When he entered he encountered thousands of people without water for drinking or washing, and he told his men to turn on their hoses. A police lieutenant tried to countermand his orders but Pierret faced him down.
Pierret learned that the detainees had handed his firefighters thousands of messages for their families. He gave his men a day’s leave along with Métro tickets to mail the letters a safe distance outside the city. He sent a warning to an off-duty Jewish firefighter named Fernand Baudvin not to return to the fire station. As a result, Baudvin and his wife were able to escape to Spain.
Pierret returned home, where his son was impatiently waiting to celebrate his twelfth birthday. Muted and pale, the fire officer could only say, “I’ve been at the Vel d’Hiv. What I have seen and heard transcends the limits of horror and human cruelty. Thousands of people, many of them children, piled up for hours, crying, screaming, begging for something to drink . . . . I opened the hydrants and gave them water.”29
The French police had done their utmost to obscure the event by closing the windows of the buses, limiting access to the stadium, and prohibiting photos. As a result, the Catala sisters could offer one of the few firsthand accounts. Rayski and Chertok published their story a few weeks later. It closed with:
They would like us to be silent about this appalling crime. But no, we cannot permit ourselves. People have to know. Everyone needs to know about what happened here.
Described as “extracts of a letter written by a young social worker to her father,” the tract was distributed widely, and Rayski believed it made a major impact.
The official news outlets focused their attention elsewhere. Movie houses showed mandatory newsreels; that week’s roundup featured a bicycle race and a forest fire. Le Figaro publicized the regime’s new relève program to recruit skilled French workers: for every three workers who went to Germany, one French prisoner of war could come home.30 In other words, the only deportations that were covered in the official French press were voluntary.
One photograph did reach Paris-Midi, where Serge Klarsfeld found it in the archives in 1990. The photo showed five city buses outside the Vel d’Hiv and detainees lined up at the door.II On the back was a handwritten label: “Juifs.” The typed caption stated, “Early yesterday morning, foreign Jews were requested by police forces to board the bus. They are leaving for a new destination to work, no doubt.” The photo and text were cleared with a Gestapo censor’s stamp but they were apparently never published.31
Once again, Solidarité’s fly-by-night reportage achieved what the official press would not. It was far from exemplary journalism. The Catala sisters were, by necessity, anonymous sources. The tract was typed in secrecy by a volunteer and distributed by hand or through furtive mailings. But it was the closest thing to contemporary news coverage the event would receive.
The UGIF’s André Baur entered the stadium late on July 16 and recorded his distress at what he found: “One gets the impression that there are only children and sick people. The nurses have tears in their eyes, the policemen are heartsick. There is no trace of even the slightest organization, no direction, no chief or too many of them.”32
When Baur appeared, the internees heckled him. Many of them knew that he and his coll
eagues possessed UGIF cards exempting them and their families from arrest. In contrast, the UGIF had sent the internees notices urging them to comply with the authorities’ instructions. As the internees saw it, the UGIF had traded them for their own safety.
The police allowed UGIF doctors to enter the stadium in rotating teams of two, and they received a warmer welcome than Baur. One of them was Fred Milhaud, a brilliant young pediatrician and junior colleague of Robert Debré’s who had also been dismissed under the Jewish ordinances.III His wife, Denise, had joined Entr’aide Temporaire in 1941, and, like the Berrs, she and her husband had joined the UGIF as a way to help stricken immigrant families. Soon the couple established a clandestine underground operation within the UGIF in concert with Hélène and the other Berr women. These privileged French Jews forged a link between the UGIF and Entr’aide to conduct acts of humanitarian sabotage that would soon connect to Suzanne Spaak’s initiatives.
At the Vel d’Hiv Fred Milhaud and his colleagues could do little for the detainees beyond making hospital referrals for certain extreme ailments, such as “life-threatening hemorrhaging” and “contagious epidemic illnesses.” Milhaud spent the night shift issuing (and often inventing) such diagnoses for detainees in an attempt to get them out—diagnoses he later described as “farfelus” (“wacky”).33 The handful of doctors, nurses, and social workers worked in shifts around the clock.
The children remained a pressing concern. A third of the nearly thirteen thousand detainees were minors, of whom roughly eight hundred were under the age of six. The Vichy government and the Gestapo had reached an agreement about deporting children from the Southern Zone, but the fate of the children in Paris was unresolved.
* * *
I. Named after the Vélodrome d’Hiver, the winter bicycle-racing stadium where the prisoners would be taken.
II. The photo from the files of Paris-Midi is the only known photo of the event.
III. Milhaud was a cousin of the composer Darius Milhaud, who had fled to the United States in 1940.
7
the ragged network
| JULY–NOVEMBER 1942 |
The first Jewish minor to be deported from France rode the initial convoy on March 27, 1942—the only one to use passenger cars. Israël Knaster was a rosy-cheeked seventeen-year-old from Warsaw who had been swept up in one of the early roundups. He arrived in Auschwitz on April 2 and died there two weeks later. There was a fifteen-year-old boy on the second convoy on June 5, and a seventeen-year-old on the third one three weeks later.1
Someone watching the trains depart may have imagined the boys assigned to a work detail, and it was still just possible to maintain that fiction. The subsequent convoys carried growing numbers of Jewish teenagers; sixteen were loaded on the fifth one, on June 28.
The plans concerning the children shifted, and shifted again. On July 17 Vichy’s director of Jewish affairs, Darquier de Pellepoix, raised new objections to sending children to the camps, arguing for placing them in UGIF children’s homes around Paris, disregarding the problem of capacity. That same day, Convoy 6 left Drancy, including twenty-two Jewish teens, while thousands still sweltered in the Vel d’Hiv.2
But the mass arrest of small children had irreparably cracked the facade. French police officials insisted on delivering them to the camps at Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande.3 Over July 19, 20, and 21, they shuttled the Jewish families from the Vel d’Hiv to the nearby Gare d’Austerlitz, roughly a thousand at a time. From there, the trains delivered them to the two outlying camps.
Jewish activists and their few non-Jewish partners faced a new crisis. Until now, they had divided their energies across many different areas: issuing underground publications, harassing the German military, gathering and sharing intelligence. Now some were compelled to focus exclusively on the deportations. For Parisians, the arrest of four thousand children made no sense. Both Jewish and non-Jewish parties were forced to reassess the official logic of the deportations, but there was no alternate explanation to take its place. After the war, Jewish prisoners who escaped from the death camps testified that none of them had known where the convoys were going or what would happen when they arrived. There is no record of such information reaching France before October 1942.4 But the harsh absurdity of arresting children created a new sense of urgency among the Jews and their supporters, and a change in broader public opinion.
The MNCR took this opportunity to reach across political and social boundaries. Léon Chertok’s most important new ally was the renowned Jewish physician Robert Debré. The son of an Alsatian rabbi, Debré still clung to his privileged position; Pétain himself had signed his exemption from the anti-Semitic law. One of Debré’s relations explained that he was allowed to maintain his practice “because the Germans took their own children to him. He was the best.”5
Debré, a widower, had met the elegant Elisabeth de la Panouse, Countess de la Bourdonnaye, while serving as pediatrician to her children. She had no use for her husband, the count, a Pétain supporter. She and Debré became a couple, who would unite in their determination to resist the occupiers. The countess, known as “Dexia,” had joined the Musée de l’Homme circle, one of the first resistance groups, and was arrested along with them in 1941. She was released after six months in prison at Fresnes; other members of the group were deported or shot. Debré and Dexia continued their work for the Gaullist resistance, but with greater caution.6
Chertok enlisted Debré as adviser for his new medical group attached to the MNCR, Combat Médicale, which united French and immigrant Jewish doctors to “denounce crimes and racist pseudo-scientists” and to “aid adult and child victims” of the occupation.7
Chertok’s clandestine medical practice was growing rapidly. Many of Rayski’s new FTP-MOI partisans were earnest young students ill prepared for amateur bomb factories or shoot-outs with the police. Chertok had to treat the wounded on the fly with whatever supplies he could find, working from hiding places around the city. He often stayed at the home of the ever-obliging Catala sisters at 74 Rue de Sèvres on the Left Bank, a five-minute walk from Robert Debré’s clinic at the Hôpital Necker.
The thousands held captive in the Vel d’Hiv were lost to them. Chertok had achieved the near impossible by infiltrating the Catala sisters into the stadium. Now the doctors, Suzanne Spaak, and their associates concentrated on rousing the conscience of the French public.
One of their prime objectives was the Catholic Church. France was an overwhelmingly Catholic country, and Pétain relied on the Church to legitimize his government. Of the early members of the MNCR, only Suzanne Spaak had a Catholic background, and she had been a resolute atheist throughout her adult life. Nonetheless, just as she was willing to play the socialite, she was ready to revisit Catholicism.
To outward appearances, Suzanne was just another mother with children on school holiday; Pilette remembers her spending the summer reading, knitting, and taking occasional trips into Paris. The MNCR left a very different account, recording that Suzanne “knocked on the doors of cardinals and demanded that they take a position in the face of the persecutions” as part of a broader MNCR offensive.8
Days after the July roundup, Léon Chertok organized a visit of a non-Jewish delegation to Emmanuel Suhard, the Catholic cardinal of Paris, to plead the cause of the Jewish children. The group included the formidable Dexia, Countess de la Bourdonnaye, as well as Chertok’s colleague Louis Pasteur Vallery-Radot, the grandson of Louis Pasteur. The delegation sought “to express the revolt of the French conscience against such acts of barbarism.”9
Their efforts may have had an effect. On July 21 Suhard met with the French Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops (ACA) and sent a letter to Pétain on the assembly’s behalf, echoing the delegation’s case:
We are deeply concerned by the reports that have reached us concerning the mass arrests of Israelites last week and the harsh treatment they experienced, above all in the Vélodrome d’Hiver, and we cannot suppress our cries of cons
cience.
In the name of Mankind and Christian principles we raise our voices in a protest, asserting the sanctity of Human Rights. This is also an anguished appeal to compassion in the face of the immeasurable great suffering, that above all so many mothers and children encounter. We request you, Marshal, to see that the principles of the law and charity are upheld.10
The letter was an important statement, but the churchmen limited its impact by voting not to make it public. Suhard himself was known as an accommodator, and he extended this approach to his relations with Vichy. In August he pleased the Germans and irked the Resistance by attending a service for French volunteers who had died fighting alongside the Germans on the eastern front. Suhard rebuked two priests for providing false baptism certificates to Jews, and invested his energies in opposing communism.11
But the MNCR found other, more promising Church contacts, sometimes through unexpected avenues. Some appeared in the Free Zone, where the MNCR’s Charles Lederman pursued a parallel course. Lederman’s goals were similar to those of the northern resistance group: infiltrating the detention centers, documenting their horrific conditions, and lobbying the non-Jewish elite. Lederman lacked the social connections of Debré, Chertok, and Spaak, but he had a secret weapon: Abbé Alexandre Glasberg, the Jewish village priest. Lederman described him as
of Polish-Russian origin, a converted Jew from Zhytomyr, where a long-established Jewish community maintained a well-known Yiddish culture.I He became a priest. Quite rotund, equally myopic, and a gourmand, this man had great heart and great courage, and was full of initiative. He revealed a talent for organization.12
