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Immediately, messengers were dispatched to
all the various children's homes, warning them to disperse the threatened
children. But it was too late. The very next morning the first children
arrived, in handcuffs.
A meeting of welfare workers was then called by
the camp to establish the procedures to be followed for recalling the children.
In asking the welfare workers to collaborate in this task, the camp
administration was giving them the means to act.
Those present included
representatives of the Quakers, the SwissAid, Cimade-YMCA, OSE, and the
Emigrants' Social Service.
The OSE delegates refused to discuss
procedures for recalling children to the camp. Reprimanded by the camp director
for an attitude he characterized as asocial, since it risked separating
children from their parents on different convoys, the women refused, in the
presence of some 20 people, to carry out the task and expressed their hope
that, with the help of those present, if they could gain a few more weeks, no
children would be deported from the Southern Zone. They indicated that they
knew "family regrouping" meant deportation, and deportation meant
extermination.
At that point the camp administration withdrew its
demand that the welfare group aid the process of recalling children from the
homes. They also backed down from consulting the welfare group's lists and the
registers of released children maintained by the camp and local police, where
the children's destinations after their release were noted. The evil was
therefore contained.
A memo was nonetheless sent to all of the camp's
barracks, asking parents to indicate the current residence of all their
children, regardless of age.
All the social workers immediately made a
beeline for the barracks to tell the parents what awaited them if they
complied: a difficult and delicate task. How on earth to spare these adults,
who had not the prayer of a chance to escape, the anxiety it was our obligation
to prevent, while hinting at the wretched fate that lay in store? And how to
persuade them not to leave with their children without telling them they would
be sent to certain death?
And in a more general sense, how were we to
behave toward these unfortunate people, and what should we tell them? We
already knew the truth. Our escorts, who had accompanied the first trains as
far as the demarcation line, returned free of all illusions: the men were
pitilessly separated from their wives – so what was the point of this
farce about family reunification?
Their baggage, too, we heard, was
taken from them. And we knew that 4,000 children separated from their parents
had been deported from Paris. Under such conditions, if there remained a
glimmer of hope for able bodied men and women, those capable of work, what
indeed could be the fate of everybody else: the ill, disabled,
children?
... The social workers slipped in and out of the lines of
people waiting to list their children. Gently, unobtrusively, for they must not
be noticed, tirelessly, moving from one to the next, they repeated, "It isn't
absolutely necessary for you to be here, you understand? Go back to your
barracks, you don't really want to see your children again now, do you?"
Those ... who knew us, understood; the rest, alas, unknowingly sent
their children to their deaths.
We had to move prudently, because it
was imperative that we remain there to stay well informed, to anticipate
hardening of the existing measures, and to be able to act, both on our
colleagues and on the administration.
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FRENCH
CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST A memorial
Serge Klarsfeld
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