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Leguay's directive is clear and imperative: "The
children should not leave in the same [deportation] convoys as their parents;
they will be kept in camp, either at Pithiviers or Beaune-la-Rolande."
To ease the conscience of the Orléans prefect, Leguay adds:
"While awaiting their departure to rejoin their parents, they will be cared
for." The image of their departure and reunion with their families apparently
will make it easier for the Prefecture to order gendarmes to beat the mothers
to separate them from their children. And those involved can find the moral
strength to carry out their orders knowing the mothers will soon find their
children again, somewhere at the other end of Europe.
In fact, Leguay
adds, the children will be leaving soon: "the children's trains will begin
departures in the second half of August." Thus, he knows perfectly well that on
August 3, 5, and 7, 2,000 mothers will be separated from their children and
deported, and that the children themselves will be deported starting two weeks
later. What meaning does he give these deportations if, for an interval of two
weeks between the last mothers' train and the first children's train, he
inflicts extraordinary suffering on the mothers and children by deporting them
separately? Leguay pretends he is not aware of the cruelty to be experienced by
these children, more than 800 of them under six years of age, crossing Europe
in sealed boxcars in midsummer, without their mothers, to be delivered to the
mercies of the SS.
Berlin has agreed in principle to the children's
deportation in the second half of August without fixing a specific date for the
first convoy. Leguay, by this time the principal negotiator and organizer of
the operation on the French side, is now in a strong position to make the
Germans accept the simultaneous deportation of the mothers and their children,
sparing them the horror of separation. It would have been enough to announce a
delay to Röthke – or to threaten a delay – in delivery of the
first 3,000 to 4,000 Jews from the Unoccupied Zone. Berlin would have quickly
agreed to permit the deportation of parents and children at the same time.
Leguay would have been certain of support from Bousquet and Laval; after all,
the Premier had revealed his "humanitarian" wish that the children not be
separated from their parents. There would have been coherence in the French
position; the decision that families would be broken up by the separate
deportations contradicted the calming effect sought by Laval.
But why
try to obtain more humane conditions from the Germans? Leguay closes his eyes
to the real significance of the deportations, which he contributes to making
even more atrocious. His principal preoccupation, in his sunny office on the
Rue de Monceau, is to fill the deportation trains scheduled by the Gestapo.
Leguay never visited the Loiret camps or Drancy, where children were interned
in physical and emotional misery; he never dared ask news of them from the
Gestapo, nor whether the two-year-olds deported not knowing their names ever
found their mothers, somewhere in Eastern Europe in the mythical and absurd
"Jewish reserve" called Auschwitz, in the center of the Polish territory
annexed by Germany.
August 5, 1942. In preparation for the
first mass roundup of Jews in the Unoccupied Zone, Henry Cado, the Associate
Director General of National Police, on Bousquet's instructions, sends regional
prefects a detailed
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FRENCH
CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST A memorial
Serge Klarsfeld
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