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In usual style Modiano presents a snapshop of time and masters to unfold every detail in his melodic yet melancholic style-
This time though, the inspiration for his novel is bordering the depressing, it being a young girl, first believed to "just" have gone missing.
Later we find out that she met a much more sinister fate ...

This is about Vichy - and I´m not talking about the mineral water - but of one of the darkest spots in French history.

Rest in Peace, Dora Bruder.

The below is taken from:

The rescue of 7,000 Jews from Nazi-occupied Denmark in January 1943 has passed from history into legend. With the help of the Danish civil service and police, and the encouragement of King Christian X, almost the entire Jewish population was smuggled out of the country overnight, to neutral Sweden, without alerting the occupying forces.

... Hungary resisted Nazi demands to hand over Jews ...

It was the most daring of all such actions to save Jews from Nazi persecution through the years of World War Two, but great risks were also taken elsewhere. In 1941, in occupied Holland, for example, Communist trade unionists held protest strikes - ending with the deportation of leading demonstrators.
Even some pro-German states took a stand. Fascist Hungary resisted Nazi demands to hand over Jews until the country was invaded in 1944. Italy had anti-Semitic laws, but nevertheless defended French Jews in south-eastern France, which was occupied by the Italian army, and thus saved thousands of lives.
The last example is the most relevant to the tragic French experience, whose consequences are yet to be resolved. More than 60 years after a collaborationist French government helped deport 75,721 Jewish refugees and French citizens to Nazi death camps, the national conscience has still not fully come to terms with the betrayal of a community persecuted by French anti-Semitic laws.

French background

After the 1789 Revolution, France was the first European country to emancipate Jews, and despite periodic resurgences of anti-Semitism the country had Europe's second biggest Jewish community - 330,000 - by 1939. About half were recent refugees from elsewhere in Europe, convinced that they would be protected by France's commitments on political and religious asylum.

... fears ... France was on the verge of a Bolshevik revolution ...

By the turn of the century, however, anti-Semitism was being encouraged by the anti-republican movement Action Francaise, which had a strong following in the Catholic Church, as well as in the army, civil service and the judiciary. The movement supported extremists who believed that Jews could never integrate into a Christian country and were potential traitors.
A virulent racist campaign intensified in 1936, when the Socialist Popular Front government was led by a Jewish prime minister, Léon Blum. His appointment added to the fears of those convinced that France was on the verge of a Bolshevik revolution, aided by Jews. These fears intensified, and dominated the French administration during the years of World War Two.
The lightning defeat of the French army by the Germans in June 1940 brought down the democratic Third Republic, which was replaced by a French state, headed by 84-year-old Maréchal Philippe Pétain, who had fought in World War One. He set up his capital at Vichy, a spa in the Auvergne. The Germans had divided France into occupied and non-occupied zones, leaving Pétain's administration in charge of about two-fifths of the country - including the cities of Lyon and Marseille.

Jewish Statute

Despite autonomy from German policies, Pétain brought in legislation setting up a Jewish Statute in October 1940. By then about 150,000 Jews had crossed what was known as the Demarcation Line to seek protection from Vichy in the south - only to find they were subjected to fierce discrimination along lines practised by the Germans in the north.

... 3,000 died of poor treatment ...

Jews were eventually banned from the professions, show business, teaching, the civil service and journalism. After an intense propaganda campaign, Jewish businesses were 'aryanised' by Vichy's Commission for Jewish Affairs and their property was confiscated. More than 40,000 refugee Jews were held in concentration camps under French control, and 3,000 died of poor treatment during the winters of 1940 and 1941. The writer Arthur Koestler, who was held at Le Vernet near the Spanish frontier, said conditions were worse than in the notorious German camp, Dachau.
During 1941 anti-Semitic legislation, applicable in both zones, was tightened. French police carried out the first mass arrests in Paris in May 1941when 3,747 men were interned. Two more sweeps took place before the first deportation train provided by French state railways left for Germany under French guard on 12 March 1942.
On 16 July 1942, French police arrested 12,884 Jews, including 4,501 children and 5,802 women, in Paris during what became known as La Grande Rafle ('the big round-up'). Most were temporarily interned in a sports stadium, in conditions witnessed by a Paris lawyer, Georges Wellers.
'All those wretched people lived five horrifying days in the enormous interior filled with deafening noise ... among the screams and cries of people who had gone mad, or the injured who tried to kill themselves', he recalled. Within days, detainees were being sent to Germany in cattle-wagons, and some became the first Jews to die in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Vichy crimes

Photograph of German troops riding horses down the Champs D'Elysee in Paris German troops parade down the Champs D'Elysee in Paris, 1940 © Many historians consider that an even worse crime was committed in Vichy-controlled southern France, where the Germans had no say. In August 1942, gendarmes were sent to hunt down foreign refugees. Families were seized in their houses or captured after manhunts across the countryside. About 11,000 Jews were transported to Drancy in the Paris suburbs, the main transit centre for Auschwitz. Children as young as three were separated from their mothers - gendarmes used batons and hoses - before being sent to Germany under French guard, after weeks of maltreatment.
During 1942, officials sent 41,951 Jews to Germany, although the deportations came to a temporary halt when some religious leaders warned Vichy against possible public reaction. Afterwards, arrests were carried out more discreetly. In 1943 and 1944, the regime deported 31,899 people - the last train left in August 1944, as Allied troops entered Paris. Out of the total of 75,721 deportees, contained in a register drawn up by a Jewish organisation, fewer than 2,000 survived.

Revolt and aftermath

The number of dead would have been far higher if the Italian fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, had not ordered troops in France to defy German-French plans for mass round ups in Italian-occupied south-eastern France. Thousands were smuggled into Italy after Italian generals said that 'no country can ask Italy, cradle of Christianity and law, to be associated with these (Nazi) acts'.

... thousands of families risked death to shelter Jews.

After the Italian surrender in September 1943, arrests in the area restarted, but by then French public opinion had changed. Escape lines to Switzerland and Spain had been set up, and thousands of families risked death to shelter Jews. Since the war, Israel has given medals to 2,000 French people, including several priests, in recognition of this, and of the fact that about 250,000 Jews survived in France.
Post-war indifference to anti-Semitic persecution pushed the issue into the background until Serge Klarsfield, a Jewish lawyer whose Romanian father died in Germany, reawakened the national conscience. He tracked down the German chief of the Secret Service in Lyon, Klaus Barbie, who was hiding in Bolivia but was subsequently jailed for life in 1987. His case threw light on Vichy's complicity in the Holocaust.
Klarsfeld's efforts were frustrated by the Socialist president of France at this time, Francois Mitterrand, who had been an official at Vichy and was decorated by Pétain. It was not until 1992 that one of Barbie's French aides, Paul Touvier, who had been a minor figure in wartime France, was jailed for life for his crimes.

Facing facts

French courts, responding to Mitterrand's warnings that trials would cause civil unrest, blocked other prosecutions, including that of the Vichy police chief, René Bousquet, who organised the Paris and Vichy zone mass arrests. He was assassinated by a lone gunman in June 1993.

... France began to face up to its responsibility in the persecution of Jews.

It was not until Mitterrand retired in 1995 that France began to face up to its responsibility in the persecution of Jews. When the new right-wing president, Jacques Chirac, came to power, he immediately condemned Vichy as a criminal regime and two years later the Catholic Church publicly asked for forgiveness for its failure to protect the Jews.
But the most significant step forward was the trial in 1997 of Maurice Papon, 89, for crimes concerning the deportation of Jews from Bordeaux. He had served as a cabinet minister after the war, before losing a 16-year legal battle to avoid trial. He was released from jail because of poor health, but his ten-year prison sentence has been interpreted as official recognition of French complicity in the Holocaust, although there are still those who continue to defend his actions.
Since the trial, France has opened up hidden archives and offered compensation to survivors - and ensured that schools, where history manuals used not to mention France's part in the deportations, now have compulsory lessons on Vichy persecution. While anti-Semitism is still a social problem in France, there is no official discrimination, and today's 600,000-strong Jewish community is represented at every level of the establishment, including in the Catholic Church, where the Archbishop of Paris is Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger.
In 1942, while on the run from the French police, Lustiger converted to Catholicism, but three years later was told that his mother had died in the Auschwitz gas chambers. It seems fitting that he presently (June 2003) occupies such an important position within French society.