Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorates the Jewish martyrs of massive and murderous ethnic cleansing.
Today I speak as a survivor of this genocide. We lost six million Jews, a great calamity for all the world’s peoples. It was the time of the Second World War, in which tens of millions perished (40 million). Now, we analyze and try to make sense of that horrific experience and seek guidance for today’s challenges.
This is a story of survival against Nazi racism, nationalism, and colonialism which holds many lessons for humanity. It is a story of resistance! It is a struggle for unity and solidarity by individuals and entire communities to counter disaster and destruction.
My Story
I come from the Nazi Holocaust in France. Back in 1942, Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler marked me down for death because I am Jewish. Hitler feared that if I lived, I could give birth to Jewish children who would seek vengeance.
Hitler and his movement didn’t merely hate Jews; they saw Jewish annihilation as a central historic goal.
When I was one year old, and still with my mother, the Nazis organized a massive raid in Paris which arrested thousands of Jews and imprisoning them in a sports arena called the Vélodrome d’Hiver (Vel d’Hiv).
The French authorities, in league with the German Nazis, had campaigned against Jewish immigrants and refugees, blaming them for the war that began in 1939, and its mounting hardships. The pro-Fascist government of Vichy passed harsh laws against Jews, even worse than the ones in Poland, from which my mother had fled.
In Poland, Jews such as my mother lived in ghettos, denied higher education and entry into professions. My mother belonged to the socialist Bund and worked for a socialist world. She escaped to France, which held the reputation of the 1789 revolution, with its promise of brotherhood, liberty, and equality. She found work in Paris and married. She joined the Jewish Union for Resistance and Mutual Aid. (The organization still exists and is sister to the United Jewish Peoples Order in Canada – UJPO).
The war and Nazi occupation brought harsh anti-Jewish oppression.
French authorities and police fell into step with the Nazis’ commands, which aimed at completely eliminating of all the Jews in Europe.
In July 1942, masses of French police raided Paris with the goal of imprisoning 22,000 Jewish men, women and children in the sports arena, Vel d’Hiv. Their early-dawn roundup seized more than 13,000 Jews. Among them were 4,000 children.
The prisoners knew not what was in store for them. Disoriented and stunned, they were transferred to several concentration camps in France.
There had been transports of Jewish prisoners during the previous year, but up to that point, most Jewish people believed the story that they were being taken to Germany for forced labour.
Now, prisoners noted with concern that women and children were being separated from men, which belied the story of the transporting of families to labor camps.
What was the truth? Where were they being sent? Would their families reunite? How would they live? They did not know.
Yet almost half of those on the arrest lists escaped arrest – including my mother and me. How was this possible?
Organized anti-Nazi resisters had alerted the Jews of Paris by word of mouth to the plan to round them up. My mother got word. Flyers in Yiddish and French were widely distributed on the eve of the roundup. Here are some instructions the resistance passed around, and I quote:
What should one do in order not to fall into the hands of the SS assassins? What should one do to hasten their own liberation?
Here is what every man, every woman, every teenager must do:
Don’t wait for the bandits at your home. Take all possible steps to hide and above all, to hide the children with the help of the French population.
After safeguarding your freedom, you need to join a patriotic organization to fight the blood-soaked enemy and avenge their crimes.
If you fall into the clutches of the bandits, you should resist by any means necessary: barricade the doors, call for help, fight the police. You have nothing to lose. You have your life to win. No matter what, try to escape. No Jew should be prey to the bloodthirsty Hitlerite beast.
Every free and living Jew is a victory over the enemy!
What to do! Should we hide or stay put?
Half of those on the arrest lists in Paris found a hiding place, including my mother and me!
For eight days, the French police held thousands of Jews in the Vel d’Hiv arena. They were packed into the enclosed arena with little access to water or food, and with no medical aid.
Where to lie down, or sit, or where to relieve yourself with no access to toilet facilities? And this inhuman treatment was the work not of the German Nazis but of the French government.
Thousands of healthy men were then sent directly to Auschwitz. Others with health or age-related issues were sent with women and children to concentration camps at Drancy, Pithiviers and Baune-la-Rolande. Children over two years old were separated from their mothers and sent to Auschwitz.
There are reports of resistance in the camps. For instance, in December 1941, French rebels in Drancy attacked German police officers; the Nazis killed forty prisoners in retaliation.
In total, 74 trains from Paris loaded with the Jewish prisoners left for Eastern Europe, carrying 76,000 deported Jews. Only three thousand survived.
The French Population Responds
During those terrible days many French people expressed and strengthened their solidarity.
It is said that “Wherever Jews were able to alert their French neighbors, wherever there was resistance, Jews were saved.” Parisian Jews acted determined and put up an active resistance against the deportation attempts.
Survivors of the great raid debated what to do next. Jewish families passed on the word, “Save the children by dispersing them.” And so they did: spontaneously, individually or with the aid of an organization, they found solutions.
When I was two years old, my mother placed me in the care of the Jewish anti-Nazi group, the Union of Jews for Resistance and Mutual Aid (UJRE). It organized my rescue by hiding me with a farm family in Auvergne, France.
Many years later, now living in New York, I received word from a woman who had known my mother in the Nazis’ Auschwitz death camp and who confirmed that she had died there. My mother had explained that she had been arrested at a Paris post office. She had gone there to send a package to my father, who was a soldier in the French army and who was imprisoned in Germany. At the post office, she was denounced and arrested for being a Jew and a political activist. While in Auschwitz, she had talked of me and of her love for me, and of her distress that she would not see me again.
Decades later, I obtained the Nazis’ own record of my mother’s trip from Camp Drancy to Auschwitz. Among a thousand names in her convoy, “Convoy Number 57,” compiled by Serge Klarsfeld, I found BERLINER FEJGA 03.12.06 Pidrikow.”
There was a postwar report on each convoy: “on that convoy #57, forty-three survived among the one thousand prisoners, including 16 women.’ A report by Henri Bulawko, one of the survivors, testified the following:
Three days and two nights in sealed boxcars. Sixty of us jammed in where 30 would barely fit. Finally, the train stopped and the doors opened with a bang.
Suddenly we had the answer to all our questions: inhuman, unexpected, and unimaginable: The Nazis shouted, “Los! Raus! Alles raus! Get out! Get out!” They separated everyone into left and right lines. One of the lines went directly to the death chambers and the other line went to the barracks, with a slim chance to live.
The Final Solution
In mid October 1942, a couple of months after the Vel d’Hiv raid, Adam Rayski, a leader of the Jewish Union, the Jewish section of the French resistance, received news from a reliable source, a Spanish comrade from the Gurs French concentration camp.
As a truck driver for the Nazi military command, he had heard the officers talk about a particular type of poison gas that was being used as an asphyxiate on incarcerated Jews sealed in freight trains. The Spanish truck driver had heard that this gas had proven its worth and was going to be used in Auschwitz to exterminate the Jews en masse. – The final solution.
News of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
In late April 1943, Rayski, received the following news:
“For the last six days, the Jews of Warsaw have resisted with arms in hand, against the assaults of the Nazis.”
The Warsaw Jews had heard about the final solution and responded!
The Jewish partisan leadership in France realised what was happening: It was an insurrection. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
In history, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising became a badge of honour and resistance for the Jewish people.
For the French Jewish people and their resistance organizations, the Warsaw Jewish insurgency was a major turning point of the war.
The revolt in the Warsaw ghetto motivated the Jewish underground cells in France to risk death rather than falling into the hands of the Nazi conquerors. It inspired many to escape to the forests, where they joined the armed partisan groups.
The revolt in the Warsaw ghetto became a beacon for all of humanity. It showed that a small handful of combatants, in complete isolation, and suffering acute deprivation, could overcome all obstacles. and embark on a heroic struggle.
How Was This Possible?
Tragically, the Nazis killed ten thousand French Jewish children. Yet far more survived – how was this possible?
Jewish French citizens joined with undocumented Jewish immigrants and fought as one for their lives.
Thousands of Jews quit Paris and went to other regions such as the city of Lyon, and the agricultural area of Auvergne in the south of France. The Jewish Union leadership organized an armed battalion and a civilian resistance and gained broad influence in collaborating with other Jewish currents.
Although there was an anti-Jewish current in France, the Nazis failed to win the entire French population to anti-Semitism. The population as a whole did not consent to genocide, and instead, enabled Jews and others persecuted to survive.
There was a multitude of individuals — who helped through spontaneous acts of kindness, timely warnings, and helpful advice – or simply by failing to obey inhuman laws. Women were found who would pass as non-Jewish or who were in fact non-Jewish. These women would mind a child. By the end of the war, an estimated 10,000 Jewish children were in hiding in France, most of them dispersed in rural areas. Initiatives to save the children were taken on an individual basis, although organizations also assisted.
This is how I was saved, taken out of Paris and protected in a rural village in the province of Auvergne.
This success was possible through broad unity against the racist environment. The Union of Jews was supported by the French Communist Party, but also worked together with other groups in the Jewish mainstream, and with non-Jews in the MNCR—National Movement Against Racism, and some Zionists. (exception of the UGIF who acted as the Judenrat did in the Occupied ghettos)
They allied with anti-Nazi forces among Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims. Many who helped out were government employees, in schools, health care, and especially in social work.
Most hidden Jewish children, just like me, were not concealed in attics or cellars but lived in plain view – going to school, church, and local festivities – protected by the community’s good will.
Their anti-Nazi movement provides an example of the power of a broad united force in resistance to fascism.
Today We Must Pay Homage
Racism is not the only characteristic of fascism, but it is the underlying and most overpowering component.
Nazism meant mass murder not only of Jews but also of people of color, socialists, gays, Slavic peoples, and the Roma people (also known as Gypsies) — who suffered their own holocaust with much effort to erase them from history. Let us not forget the Nazi mass murder of the disabled and mentally afflicted – In other words, all who did not fit into the deranged Nazi concept of a master race.
In the same way, we must resist and organize against white supremacy in Canada today. It strikes first at Muslims, because of their culture, their skin colour, and their country of origin. It strikes at all who are Black or brown, or oriental. It strikes at refugees from war, poverty, and climate change. It strikes at Indigenous people, our age-old guardians of this land.
Our response is solidarity. Solidarity calls for action.
And our solidarity is universal, embracing all peoples. Let’s take a moment to consider the implication of that statement. What that means to us today, especially as Jews.
Right now, we hear of repeated attacks on Palestinians in Jerusalem and Gaza.
As South Africa’s anti-apartheid heroic leader Nelson Mandela said, “We know too well, that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
We must seek new ways of collaborating with all who struggle against white supremacy and racism. It is the underlying xenophobic philosophy of the right wing and Nazi agenda.
Today, we face not only the danger of a third world war but of nuclear annihilation and the death of countless millions.
We must unite in common for our lives, and the lives of our forthcoming generations; for a future that appreciates our different skin tone, languages, cultures, and diverse approaches to living in peace.
That is the lesson from Jewish survival under Nazism in France.
We, who seek a humane society which promotes health, nourishment, housing education, freedom of expression, and love of the natural world – we must find ways to unite against racism and the profit system which drives the wars and which threaten our survival.
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1. https://www.middleeasteye.netnews/nelson-mandela-30-years-palestine
2. “When Did They Decide,” Christopher B. Browning, The New York Review, March 24, 2022.
3. The Vel d’Hiv Raid: French Police at the Service of the Gestapo. Maurice Rajfus, DoppleHaus Press,, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 2022.
4. Rayski, Ada et al., Le Sang de l’Etranger, Paris: Fayard, 1959.
5. Wikipedia.
6. Hazan, Katy, Les orphelins de la Shoah: Les Maisons de l’Espoir (1944–60), Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2003.
7. Semelin, Jacques, Persecutions et Entraides dans la France Occcupé. Paris: des Arènes, 2013.
8. Les Amis de la CCE, Album de la CCE: 40 Ans des Souvenirs, Paris: ACCE, 1998.