December publications Serge Klarsfeld, a tireless Nazi hunter who located Klaus Barbie, among others, and the author of 20 books on the Holocaust, has compiled an astonishing, haunting document which restores to us the memory of 2500 children deported by the Vichy government to the German death camps. French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial has a b&w picture of each child, with a short paragraph detailing his or her place of birth, parentage and manner of deportation. By forcing us to confront each victim individually, Klarsfeld not only allows readers a vital historical connection to them but has shown how any attempt to explain their plight must fail.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Editor's note: In ordinary circumstances, Booklist
would rarely devote space to a 1,881-page documentary reference work costing $95. Clearly, such a work is specialized and almost certainly of more interest to scholars than general readers. Yes, all that is true, but when you read Molly McQuade's Focus essay below, you'll see that this is a very special 1,881-page book. It's a memorial, really, to French children who died in the Holocaust, and as such its heft only adds to its poignance. Though the book may seem to fall into a category outside our usual scope, its mission, to provide a "collective gravestone" for some 11,400 French children, was one we could not ignore.]Among the 75,000 French Jews deported to Nazi death camps were 11,400 children, ranging in age from teenagers to toddlers less than two years old. Nearly all were sent to the gas chamber. Their remains were burned. Serge Klarsfeld, well known for his efforts to locate former Nazis and bring them to trial, has compiled French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial as "an instrument of memory" to document the lost French children. First published in France in 1994, the book was translated into English by Glorianne Depondt and Howard M. Epstein, with additional translation by the poet Magda Bogin, and published by New York University Press in the fall of 1996.
The enormous volume of nearly 2,000 pages, priced at $95, serves as a dolefully heroic atlas of unthinkable destinies. In page after page, 2,500 children's faces rise in photographs from the brink of better times: a brother and sister, Elie and Helene Magier, hold hands in front of the Eiffel Tower. The brothers Albert and David Szymkowicz sit side by side like twins, incurably innocent of the future. Every deported child of the 11,400 is documented in a paragraph or more providing name, place of birth, age and address at time of deportation, and deportation convoy number. Some entries include other information, as well as excerpts from the children's diaries and letters.
Sarah Lichtstein, who was arrested at age 14 in the notorious Velodrome d'Hiver "roundup" of 4,000 Jewish children in Paris in 1942, escaped after her deportation and wrote of the 1942 arrest: "I can still see every detail of that day marked by grief. . . . On the track where cyclists normally ride, people are sitting on their suitcases, terrified, disoriented. Some of them are running every which way and shouting, but most of us just sit there silently, as if paralyzed by anxiety, not understanding what is happening to us. People recognize each other and shout out the details of what they saw during their arrest; a woman threw herself from a fifth story, a man hanged himself, a mother was torn from her children, they fired on people who were trying to escape. I listen terrified, and watch people being carried in on stretchers."
The arrival of a children's deportation convoy at Drancy, just outside Paris, was observed in 1943 by Odette Daltroff-Baticie. "Buses arrive. We remove children in unimaginable condition. A cloud of insects surrounds them, and a terrible stench. They have traveled for days and nights from Pithiviers in sealed boxcars: 90 to a car. . . . The horror of the days they have lived through has been etched into their small faces, stigmatized them. They have understood everything, like adults."
As that witness was quick to note, the smallest children--the very youngest was 15 months old--were too young even to know their own names. The Nazis identified them only by assigned numbers. Klarsfeld confides in his preface, "I felt a deep shame that they died nameless to the world."
Part of his work as a historian of genocide involved verifying the spelling of family names of children as these were known at deportation. Deportation records listed variants. In addition, children of East European parentage usually had both a French name and a Yiddish one. The French spellings of the Yiddish names included many inconsistencies. Klarsfeld searched for this and other information by talking extensively with French survivors and seeking out sources via radio and newspaper in France, the U.S., Israel, and elsewhere.
Only 300 of the deported French Jewish children are known to have survived their ordeal. Klarsfeld himself was hunted as a child by the Nazis in Nice, where his family, Romanian by nationality, was then hiding. Arno Klarsfeld, his father, was captured there in 1943 by Alois Brunner, an SS officer and deputy of Adolf Eichmann, and was later killed in Auschwitz. The father gave himself up in order to save his wife and children, who were concealed nearby in a closet. Molly McQuade
