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AUTHOR'S
PREFACE
The eyes of 2,500 children gaze at us from across the
years in these pages. They are among the more than 11,400 children whose lives
are chronicled here1 innocent children who were taken from their
homes all over France to be deported and put to death in the Nazi camps. Here
are the names, addresses, birth dates, and the truth about what happened to all
of these children. Their biographies are brief because their lives were brief.
On behalf of the few survivors of their families, this book is their collective
gravestone.
More than 50 years have passed since the murders of these
beautiful children – for they are all beautiful in my eyes – who once
played in the streets of Paris, Marseilles, Lyons, Nice, and other French
cities and villages you may know. It has taken so long for many people in
France to confront what happened here, to these children from our neighborhoods
and towns and cities. And perhaps it is time to share this with others so they
may know how these terrible events happened and come to know some of the young
victims, arrested in the streets you will find if you visit France.
This book is born of my obsession to be sure that these children will
not be forgotten. Twenty years ago, when reconstructing the lists of Jews
deported to death from France, I found that some of the deported children were
listed only by number – the infants were too young to know or say their
names – and I felt a deep shame that they died nameless to the world. At
first I was gripped with an obsession to know all their names and to discover
the places where they lived; eventually I had an obsession to know their faces.
After year of searching, of asking French survivors, of writing in Jewish
newspapers and speaking on the radio in France, Israel, America, and other
countries, I have found photographs of more than 2,500 of these lost children.
After 50 years their faces are seen again in the pages of this book.
There is no question that in France, during the period the French refer
to as the Shoah and Americans as the Holocaust, children were a smaller
proportion of the Jews annihilated than was the case in some neighboring
countries. We know there was a great effort in France to rescue Jewish
children, an effort initiated by Jewish organizations, supported by many
Christian and secular groups, and aided by many ordinary citizens who acted
spontaneously against the persecutions of
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1. Jewish children under the age of 16 made up not less than 21
percent of the total Jewish population in France at the beginning of World War
II, based on censuses taken by both the Germans and the Vichy government. This
age distribution was probably similar in Belgium and Italy. While comparisons
of relative numbers of deportees are not exact because the age categories do
not match precisely, nonetheless they substantiate the point: In France, 9,300
of the 75,700 Jews deported, or 12.3 percent, were under age 16; 11,400, or 15
percent, were under age 18. In Belgium, where 5,200 Jewish children under the
age of 15 were deported out of a total of 25,500 Jewish deportees, the
proportion was 20 percent. In Italy, 21.5 percent of the deportees were under
age 20.
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FRENCH
CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST A memorial
Serge Klarsfeld
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