How many French collaborated with the NAZI’s
Auschwitz victim’s book causes a stir in France
By Colin Randall in Paris- The UK Telegraph
A hidden literary treasure of wartime France is taking the book world by storm, while reviving uncomfortable memories of French collaboration with the Nazis, more than 60 years after its author was sent to her death in Auschwitz.
Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Française, transcribed and edited by her elder daughter, who clung to the manuscript as a keepsake of her mother, has been sold to publishers in 17 countries in an extraordinary bidding war.
Nemirovsky died of typhus in Auschwitz
The book combines two novels, one dealing with the flight of Jews from Paris during the great exodus of 1940 and the second with the early period of Nazi occupation.
It has won acclaim from French critics, with calls for a posthumous award when the Goncourt prize, the country’s premier book award, is announced next month.
Suite Française - the completed half of what Nemirovsky planned as the four-volume “work of my life” - is regarded by some commentators as the most important descriptive wartime writing since Anne Frank’s Diaries.
From the appearance of her first novel, David Golder, in 1929, when she was 26, Nemirovsky was feted as the darling of Parisian literary society. But she was also a Jew, born in Kiev to a prosperous banker’s family. When the Germans invaded France, Nemirovsky was deserted by almost all those who had previously sought her company and admired her work.
Despite appeals to the German ambassador to Paris and Marshal Petain, the leader of the puppet Vichy regime, she was arrested by gendarmes and deported to Auschwitz in July 1942, dying of typhus a month later at the age of 39.
Her conversion to Roman Catholicism as war broke out, and her family’s move from Paris to Burgundy, failed to save her. Her husband, Michel Epstein, was detained later along with his two brothers and sister. They, too, perished, almost certainly in the Auschwitz gas chambers.
Nemirovsky’s daughters, Denise and Elisabeth, were spared, apparently because they reminded a German officer of his own child. For the rest of the war, they were cared for by a Catholic woman who moved them from one safe house to another. In a suitcase carried on each of a dozen moves, Denise Epstein kept the leather-bound notebooks containing her mother’s last writings.
“I never opened it until 1954,” said Miss Epstein, now 75. “It made me angry to read it. Seeing my mother’s wonderful lucidity just gave me a tremendous sensation of abandonment.”
Not until the 1970s did she open the book “properly”, after her Paris home was flooded and she decided to move it to the safety of a shelf.
The first novel, Storm in June, was typed. The second, Dolce, written as paper became scarce, was in minute handwriting.
Over the next 20 years. Miss Epstein painstakingly read and transcribed, over and over again, her mother’s text.
“She could look inside the human soul and make music with her words. But it is only now that I can look at it as a reader rather than as my mother’s daughter,” she said.
The success of Suite Française is encouraging news for an American academic who researched his own biography of Nemirovsky only to be told it was not marketable.
Prof Jon Weiss, who lectures in French and 20th century French literature at Colby College, Maine, described Nemirovsky as “an enigma and an absolutely fantastic novelist of the 1930s”.
Comments:
Indeed there was collaboration in France. So was there in every German occupied aera (yes, even in pure-protestant-white Norway; Quisling anyone ?). Nazi troops were even welcomed with open arms in many eastern countries (though it’s easily explained by the fact that they couldn’t see how Hitler could be worse than Stalin).
Whether you like it or not, in France there were courageous individuals who risked their lives to hide Jews from the Vichy regime and the Gestapo. Just as there were officials and common people eager to send Jews to their death, of course. The majority though, neither helped nor prevented the tragedy. Just as anywhere else.
Your point of France being antisemitic is completely ridiculous. Discrimination against Jews nowadays is non-existant (especially compared to anti-black or anti-muslim discrimination). Antisemetic acts do occur, but they’re commited by a minority of ill-integrated and thus easily manipulated youth of North-African origin (added to the usual skin-head arch-minority). No one’s getting killed, serious injuries are extremely rare. In fact, it’s pretty much comparable with FBI’s figures on anti-jewish hate crimes, proportionnaly.
As to reviving uncomfortable memories, yes that’s an excellent thing. But why should mentioning slavery and segregation, pre-Hitlerian theorists like Madison Grant, genocide of natives, war crimes in Vietnam or elsewhere automatically earn a free “america-hater” label ?
BTW, if you indulged into learning a little bit more history, you’d find much more relevant reasons to criticize France. Believe me, there’s no lack of it. Though in this case I know that you’re not criticizing France for the sake of it, but rather in a covonluted attempt to defend the indifensible state of Israel.
Posted by Boris at October 23, 2004 06:43 PM
It is not the concept of a state of Israel that is indefensible. The way it was created was a mistake, but what is done is done - the state of Israel has now a right to exist just like any other state. But expansionnism and crimes against humanity are hard to defend, whoever the culprit may be.
Brandishing accusations of anti-semitism at any critic of Israel is not very original, you know. At the same time, I am fully aware that this is almost the only argument at your disposal for defense. I really can’t think of anything else, except maybe securing the return of Christ, or Israel as the rampart of white western civilization against the filthy horde of infidel muslims. Those are generally the reasons why people outside Israel support it, but mentioning them can only get you laughed at, so I can understand you.
As to the safety of Jews in France : go to France, speak with common French Jews. Not some right-wing lobby representative obviously. I have many Jewish friends or colleagues, and only one of them has had trouble : intimidation, you-know-what sprayed on her door etc… But discrimination in their lives they are yet to meet. Education, employment, housing they’re all getting just as any other French… that isn’t of African, Middle-Eastern or Rrom descent.
The Dreyfuss affair saw two sides of the population fight each other : left-wing progressives and right-wing chauvinists. Guess who wanted Dreyfuss’head. Today, apart among the Front National, that still sadly gets way too many votes, antisimetism has completely disappeared, politically. Many right as well as left wing political figures are Jewish. I’m yet to hear anyone mention that as relevant, let alone complain about it.
As to French history of foreign and domestic policy, I couldn’t list all the crimes France is responsible of. Did you know that the first modern genocidal methods were invented in France during the revolution ? They had so many thousands of people to eliminate ; they needed a way of killing and getting rid of bodies fast, and they found one. Needless to say, they don’t linger on that at school.
But you’re completely fooling yourself if you think that the US’s (or any other sizeable state’s) records are any better. You’d be only thinking so because you’re born there, and you’d be yet to get an objective eye. I remember, when I was a kid, I thought that France was better than any other country… Naturally, I agree that people that criticises the US and can’t see their own country’s flaws are contemptible (I had a less polite word in mind). I have no respect for anti-americanism, especially when it stretches to making fun of American people. And France as “the country of human rights” is quite a good joke, if you like cynical ones.
I hope you meant there are 22 muslim STATES. Please, take note, state and nation _really_ aren’t the same thing. Kurds = nation, yet no state. UK = 1 state, yet 4 nations.
Things have changed since 1948. I know that some like to paint the world map in 2 or 3 colors; but frankly, the day we see those 22 states united, give me a call. Apart from close neighbours, most have other concerns than Israel. For instance, do you think Morocco, Algeria and Libya are more hostile to Israel than they are to each other ? I really don’t think so. And what about Egypt, and US allies ?
And yes, some of the neighbours (as well as some of the terrorists) cynically use Palestinians as a tool for lowly traditional geopolotical purposes. They don’t care about them. Palestinian exiles in neighboring countries are generally discriminated against and held away from society. Does all that grant Israel a right to do even worse ? I don’t think so.
Posted by Boris at October 24, 2004 05:28 PM
