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see their own police, soldiers, and even firemen
hunting down Jews in the Vichy Zone. Leading clergymen, among them the bishops
of Toulouse and Montauban, protested the arrests as violations of human rights.
The archbishop of Lyons went further and protected Jewish children; many Jewish
mothers entrusted their children to Christian militants who, waiting at the
Lyons railway station, convinced them their final destination was certain
death.
Laval hung back at the beginning of September; he knew his
regime could be jeopardized if he accepted the demands of Heinz Röthke,
Dannecker's successor as head of the Gestapo's Jewish Affairs Department.
Röthke, seemingly less single-minded about his work, nonetheless pursued
the same goals. In order to keep to the October schedule, it would be necessary
to step up arrests of French Jews. Laval refused.
The Germans did not
retaliate in any way against Laval for his refusal to accept accelerated
deportations. Their failure to respond suggests it might have been possible for
him to resist the German pressures that led to the Vel d'Hiv arrests and the
deportations of children.
Before 1942 ended, nearly 42,000 Jews were
deported from France to the East. In 1943 the Germans deported 17,000 Jews from
France, and in 1944, 15,000 more. (Nearly 2,000 more Jews were deported through
Belgium and in other transports.) As the war progressed and an Allied victory
seemed more and more inevitable, French police became increasingly reluctant to
take part in the round-ups of Jews. The Vichy political police, known as the
Milice, along with a special commando group led by Alois Brunner, helped to
make the arrests for deportations during this period. The ferocity of Nazi anti
Semitism assured that deportations of Jews to the death camps in the East would
continue until the day Allied troops began the liberation of Paris. However, in
1943 and 1944, more and more ordinary French people contributed greatly to
saving Jews.
In all, the Germans deported more than 75,700 Jews from
France, transporting most of them to Auschwitz in convoys of freight cars, each
carrying an average of a thousand people. Only 2,564 French deportees are known
to have survived the war. Including the Jews who died of malnutrition and
disease in French camps, there were 80,000 victims of the Final Solution in
France. This was approximately one-quarter of the 325,000 Jews who were
estimated to be living in France at the start of the war.
There were
11,174 children on the 75 major deportation convoys that were dispatched from
France to Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps in the East. To this number
must be added 228 children from the Departments of the Nord and the Pas-de
Calais, who were deported through Belgium, for a total of 11,402 children
deported from France. In addition, 85 children are known to have died of
disease or malnutrition in French camps, and 31 children, some as young as 15
– one was only 14 years old – were shot by the Germans, a few while
attempting to escape and the rest by firing squads. Very few of the 11,402
children who were deported, perhaps 300 of them, survived the war.
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FRENCH
CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST A memorial
Serge Klarsfeld
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