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Attacks and sabotage are launched against the Germans
by French Resistance groups, and a progressive disintegration of the Vichy
government's power and authority is evident. The coming defeat of Nazi Germany
is now apparent, and many who have acquiesced in Vichy's rule abandon it. But
the SS and their French collaborators, the Vichy Milice, continue to hunt Jews
for deportation to the death camps. Brunner, one of the most savage of the
hunters, will use his remaining weeks as a Gestapo officer in France to seize
Jewish children from Paris area children's shelters.
July 4,
1944. Gestapo agents from Lyons go to the prison at Annemasse to take away
Marianne Cohn, 20, arrested June 1 while guiding a group of 28 children on a
clandestine border crossing into Switzerland. The children are saved. Cohn is
tortured and murdered by the Gestapo agents and her body is found later in the
ossuary of Ville-la-Grande.
July 11, 1944. At a restricted
meeting of a commission of CRIF, the newly formed Representative Council of the
Jews of France, Leon Meiss, president of the council, sums up the arguments in
favor of disbanding the UGIF and discusses how to protect the children in UGIF
centers.
Meiss asserts, "If we ask ourselves how liquidation of the
UGIF will be viewed, we are stopped by the role it plays in the Northern Zone.
We know that UGIF administers camps and canteens and centers for children
released to it by the authorities. The children are untouchable, the canteens
eminently useful, but what can we say about the camps; the most important of
them, Drancy, is almost entirely in the hands of the UGIF. Can we sacrifice our
wretched brothers? ..." Nevertheless, Meiss declares, "We must close down the
UGIF. If we agree, we cannot delay the date."
But it was delayed too
long; it was absolutely necessary to remove the children from the UGIF's homes
and disperse them, as OSE had done in the Southern Zone beginning in November
1943. The task was possible with the help of resistance movements, especially
in a city as large as Paris. It is true that there would have been reprisals
against UGIF directors in the Northern Zone, who probably would have been
arrested and deported unless they disappeared into the underground when the
children were dispersed. The moral strength to act in this way to save the
children was visibly absent. Whatever the reprisals would have been, they would
not have been more terrible than the possible arrests and deportation of some
250 children to Auschwitz – a camp where few children survived –
under the eyes of the UGIF's directors. This shameful stain forever marked the
UGIF, obscuring the positive aspects of the organization, which was conceived
by the Germans to advance the Final Solution, but which undeniably helped Jews
much more than it harmed them. Moreover, it must be emphasized that Jewish
resistance fighters who tried to convince the UGIF to disperse the children to
safety also lacked the spirit, initiative, and energy to act illegally in place
of the organization's fearful directors.
July 21, 1944. Alois
Brunner launches raids against the dozen UGIF children's centers in the Paris
area, home to about 350 Jewish children, the night of July 21. The failure of
the generals' plot against Hitler's life that day probably contributes to the
decision of Brunner, who wants to deport the maxi […mum]
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FRENCH
CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST A memorial
Serge Klarsfeld
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