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The Holocaust History Project.

FRENCH CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST

A memorial
Serge Klarsfeld  

 
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lists that were divided into sub-lists by geographic origin. Others came from documents in departmental archives noting the departure for Drancy of a convoy of Jews from a particular place. For the period October 1942 to June 1943, the assembly centers noted in the Drancy registers are the places where Jews arrested by French police were regrouped and sent on to Drancy. They include more local assembly points than the registers show for the period July 1943 to August 1944, when Drancy had come under German administration. For this later period, the registers show the various German security services which sent arrested Jews to Drancy, such as SD (Sicherheitsdienst) Lyons, SD Vichy, SD Rennes, SD Limoges. SD personnel were most often based at the seats of regional prefectures or in their sub-offices, such as SD Annemasse, SD Chambéry, or SD Perpignan.

Historic Notes about Each Convoy


The histories of each deportation convoy, including the total number of children under age 18 and the proportion of girls and boys it carried, are based on information contained in the Mémorial and in Le Calendrier de la Persécution des Juifs de France (1993). They have been prepared with a view to evoking, often with new documentation, the problems faced by Jewish children in France during the war. The figures given for the numbers of children in each convoy may differ slightly from the summary table at the end of the convoy histories; the summary is based on the latest verified information.

The Children's Photographs

Public appeals for photographs of the children began in 1993. They were broadcast on Jewish radio programs and published in the Jewish press in France and as well in Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Israel, the United States, and Australia. (I was told that one appeal made its way to an Internet bulletin board.) I wrote hundreds of personal letters to the members of the FFDJF who were plaintiffs in the cases against Kurt Lischka, the Paris SiPo-SD chief, and Jean Leguay, the Vichy police delegate in Paris, and to all those who wrote after publication of the 1978 Mémorial and who might have had brothers or sisters who were deported. We also asked the Holocaust Memorial in Washington, D.C., to appeal for photographs from Jews who had come to the United States from France or who were related to Jews deported from France.

We collected some of the photographs directly. I researched and copied some photographs preserved at the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and in various French government archives. Regine and Maurice Lippe and Annette Zaidman, members of the FFDJF, researched the children's photographs displayed on family tombstones in the Bagneux and Pantin cemeteries near Paris. Maurice Lippe photographed the tombstones. I wrote the captions that accompany the photographs, using whatever information – some of it quite meager – was available.

The first French edition of this children's memorial was published in October 1994, with faces of 1,536 of the children in photographs. More photos were received, and a second edition, with pictures of 1,834 children, was published in March 1995. A supplement with an additional 497 photographs was published in January 1996, and we have since obtained 172 more photos – so that we have
 
   
   

FRENCH CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST

A memorial
Serge Klarsfeld

 
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Last modified: March 9, 2008
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