The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews [Paperback]

Susan Zuccotti (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0803299141 | ISBN-13: 978-0803299146 | Publication Date: April 1, 1999

Many recent books have documented the collaboration of the French authorities with the anti-Jewish German policies of World War II. Yet about 76 percent of France’s Jews survived—more than in almost any other country in Western Europe. How do we explain this phenomenon? Certainly not by looking at official French policy, for the Vichy government began preparing racial laws even before the German occupiers had decreed such laws. To provide a full answer to the question of how so many French Jews survived, Susan Zuccotti examines the response of the French people to the Holocaust. Drawing on memoirs, government documents, and personal interviews with survivors, she tells the stories of ordinary and extraordinary French men and women. Zuccotti argues that the French reaction to the Holocaust was not as reprehensible as it has been portrayed.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Despite the French Vichy regime's complicity in the roundup and deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps, roughly three-fourths of France's Jews, an estimated 250,000 people, survived. Zuccotti, author of the National Jewish Book Award-winner Italians and the Holocaust , attributes their survival partly to "benign neglect"--the vast majority of French men and women kept silent, allowing Jews to remain in hiding or to cross borders. Many Jews in France with fake papers and ration cards survived by living quietly and taking odd jobs, abetted, according to Zuccotti, by the passive goodwill of hundreds of thousands of French men and women who simply went about their own business. Using a wealth of archival documents, the author chronicles the clandestine networks of Jewish rescue organizations, the heroic efforts of armed Jewish resistance groups and the assistance provided by non-Jews such as the 3000 residents of Le Chambon who hid some 5000 Jews in their homes. She also charts the treachery of Vichy politicians and of countless French collaborators who joined fascist leagues to hunt down resistants and Jews. European history professor at Barnard and Columbia, Zuccotti forces us to rethink the French response to the Holocaust in this challenging book. Photos.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Zuccotti ( The Italians and the Holocaust , LJ 2/15/87) has written another fine, highly readable Holocaust study. While 250,000 (or 76 percent) of France's Jews survived the war, they survived despite the vicious anti-Semitism of the Vichy government, which often zealously anticipated Nazi requests for rooting out Jews--especially foreign-born Jews--and deporting them on trains to death camps. The Vichy government had little mercy for children or the elderly. Fortunately, many French citizens aided Jews either actively, by warning them of upcoming raids or hiding Jewish children, or passively, by simply not informing on them. Altogether, it is a checkered history. This book should be read in conjunction with an important study by Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (Basic Bks., 1981). Highly recommmended for most libraries.
- Paul Kaplan, Dakota Cty. Lib., Eagan, Minn.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 392 pages
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press (April 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803299141
• ISBN-13: 978-0803299146
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #922,803 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Indispensable Book, October 8, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews (Paperback)

This is an indispensable book for anyone interested in this subject. For all of us who think of the holocaust as a fast, furious and random event, Zucotti corrects us in showing a no less devilish but organized, punctilious horror. I am truly in awe of my grandparents, people who always respected the law and wouldn't think of not responding to a summonce, for having the wits and the luck to escape anihilation in occupied france.

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Holocaust in France, May 15, 2001

By 

Olga Loaiza (Dallas, TX United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews (Paperback)

"The Holocaust, The French, and The Jews" is a book full of stories that we should never forget because they are filled with teachings for all of us.

The powerful capacity that we, human beings, have to bring pain and or sorrow on other human beings is astonishing. The hardships that the Jews had to endure while Hitler was in power was a vivid proof of that. But I don't believe that their suffering was in vain. And I want to learn from their past. I want to remember the ones who died and honor the ones who survived. To learn from their past, I have to know their past and the writer of this book, Susan Zuccotti, helped me do so.

To understand their past, I would have to imagine what it could be to breathe the heavy and dreadful air as the profound anguish rose with the German ordinance that dictated that all Jews must wear the David's star. I supposed that Hitler figured out that if he was going to slaughter the shepperd's sheep, what a better way but to mark them?

To learn about the Jews, I would have to imagine exactly what it could be to be an eight-year-old boy who went home beaten up every day because on the upper left side of his shirt, a six-pronged yellow star with the word "Juif" in the center had been sewn. And to wonder how many people thought that the boy was a dirty "youpine" (foreign Jew). To understand I would have to know what it could be to leave one's childhood at the edge of a bench as one watch a flock of children, women and old people carrying bundles of cloth while being herded to a dark destiny. To hear the sound of their cries reaching all the way to heaven with "All the human pain that both life and death provide"

I would have to know or experience seeing the young worker's face--the one who carried in his wallet the false identity cards and baptismal certificates of his wife and child-- at the news that his family had gotten caught up in a massive roundup at the other side of the city.

"The Holocaust, The French and The Jews" is a book filled with downcast stories like those. In most of these stories, the main character did not live two months after the incident occurred. These stories have helped me understand what it was to be a Jew and what consequences this brought into their lives, the lives of others and the making of history. It has also helped me see, had I been there, that just as during the holocaust each person took a place in history, so I could have taken mine. I could have taken the place of the policeman, the traitor, the helper, the accuser, the guilty, the damned, the indifferent, the youpine or the "Friend of the Jews", the dictator, the orphan, the lost, the hungry, the powerful, the widow, the blind, the hopeless, the saint. And now should another holocaust occur, and after reading this book, I can choose more freely the place I want to take.

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Catholic problem, February 16, 2011

By 

Ilana Hicks "The Bubba" (walnut creek, california) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews (Paperback)

This is for Ellen, the last person to post a comment. I would recommend the film "the shame and the sorrow," a great documentary chronicling French participation in the Holocaust. Unfortunately, the French Catholic church not only was complacent when French Jews were being rounded up, many among them actively encouraged it. Some started sermons with the "Heil Hitler" salute. The author did not create the Catholic problem, the Catholic church did. The Church's history of perpetuating the deicide myth, blood libel and its insistence that Jews deserved eternal condemnation and punishment throughout history, played directly into Nazi ideology. Denying history will not improve the Catholic Church's image; active denunciation of past hateful preaching will!