Authors: Adam Rayski, Will Sayers
ISBN-13: 9780268040215, ISBN-10: 0268040214
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Date Published: April 2005
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Based on extensive research into previously unpublished sources, including the archives of the military, the Central Consistory of the Jews of France, police prefectures, and Philippe Petain, Adam Rayski clearly demonstrates the Vichy government's role as an accomplice in the Nazi program of genocide. He also explores the sizeable prewar divide between French-born and immigrant Jews. This manifested itself in cultural conflicts and mutual antagonism as well as in varied initial responses to the antisemitic edicts and actions of the Vichy government. Rayski reveals how these communities eventually set aside their differences and united to resist the Vichy-supported Nazi threat.
Rayski, a journalist, historian, and former Resistance worker, uses archival material, oral interviews, and his own personal reminiscences to piece together a rich and detailed description of the challenges faced by French Jewry during World War II. Rayski describes key aspects of Jewish life in these years, including the long-standing cultural rift between French-born and immigrant Jews and its impact on the wartime experience, and covers issues ranging from the variety and diversity of Jewish resistance groups to the changing role of French public opinion as persecution and anti-Semitic propaganda escalated. Through interviews with survivors, he pieces together the "hidden face" of daily Jewish life under the Occupation and relates the experiences of those who went underground-an especially rich and valuable discussion as this phenomenon has rarely been studied. Rayski aims to answer fundamental questions, e.g., with France's record of xenophobia and anti-Semitism, why did nearly three-quarters of all Jews in the country survive? This complex but important book is recommended for scholars of French history and Jewish and Holocaust studies.-Marie Marmo Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJ Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Foreword | ||
Ch. 1 | The first anti-Jewish measures : dark forebodings | 11 |
Ch. 2 | The consistory between religion and politics | 25 |
Ch. 3 | Preliminaries to a massacre | 41 |
Ch. 4 | The creation of the UGIF, the "compulsory community" | 56 |
Ch. 5 | The yellow star : stigmatize, humiliate, and isolate the Jews | 72 |
Ch. 6 | July 1942 : the great roundup and the first acts of resistance | 84 |
Ch. 7 | The inhuman hunt in the southern zone | 102 |
Ch. 8 | Drancy : the last circle before hell | 125 |
Ch. 9 | "Night and fog" : the battle against silence | 147 |
Ch. 10 | People of the shadows | 162 |
Ch. 11 | Do not forget the children | 176 |
Ch. 12 | "Intermezzo," or the Italian reprieve | 193 |
Ch. 13 | Jewish perceptions of the war | 208 |
Ch. 14 | 1943 : by the light of flames from the Ghetto | 221 |
Ch. 15 | Jews, French and resistant | 242 |
Ch. 16 | The Jewish scouts take up arms | 259 |
Ch. 17 | The Jewish resistance in all its variety | 272 |
Ch. 18 | CRIF : constructing the future in the shadow of death | 286 |
Ch. 19 | A time for all fears and all hopes | 300 |
Conclusion : the weight of the present and of the future | 313 | |
Afterword : the twenty-first century | 317 |