Coda: Remembering the Passeurs
In 2016, an excellent essay by Israeli historian Renée Poznanski asked a provocative question. The title provided the setting for the argument that followed: “Was the French Resistance Jewish?”1 The importance of the Resistance in France, she argued, “cannot be measured solely in terms of the military exploits of its member groups or by its contribution to the liberation of France.”2 With this, Poznanski echoed the sentiments of Holocaust survivor and scholar Saul Friedländer, who wrote in 1996 of “the resistance of those who acted within Jewish resistance movements to wage a battle for survival.”3
Of course, the French Resistance, taken in its totality, was not wholly Jewish, but that was not Poznanski’s point. Rather, she sought to place the contribution of Jews into a context, explaining how the “French Jews—under a double jeopardy of anti-Semitic law (French and German), stripped of their possessions, interned in camps, then sent on to Auschwitz—contributed in full to the story of the Resistance.”4
Elsewhere, Georges Wellers, a Russian-born French historian who survived the Holocaust in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, also wrote of the distinctive nature of Jewish resistance:
True resistance was that which helped Jews hide by finding them a secure hiding place; by forging counterfeit identity papers for them, such as false baptism and birth certificates, and false ration cards; by giving them safe passage over the Swiss or Spanish border, or across the demarcation line; by providing them with a minimum of financial means necessary for their daily, clandestine existence; by ridding them by force of arms of informers and “Jew hunters;” by helping and instigating the escape of Jewish detainees; by composing, printing, and circulating news meant to give the persecuted people moral support and arouse sympathy for them among the non-Jewish population.5
All the activities, initiatives, and stratagems to which Wellers referred were employed by the women and men, in their various organizations, outlined in this book.
A more orthodox definition of the French Resistance came in the aftermath of the liberation of France in 1944. According to this, France in arms became a dominant narrative, demonstrating an effective unified response to the German occupation. Moreover, this was armed resistance; as shown by Olivier Wieviorka, “the resistance is defined in the first place by its actions,” that is, “its aim was to do battle concretely with the German occupier, and even its Vichy ally.”6 That said, according to Wieviorka—and in contrast to the view expressed by Wellers—“a smuggler who transported Jews [Wieviorka qualifies this by use of the term ‘for money’] cannot be considered a resister, even if by his actions he thwarted the genocidal ambition of the Nazi regime.”7
Indeed, Wieviorka holds that while most Jews in France survived in hiding rather than through being smuggled, it is clear that those who engaged in smuggling were, to a large extent, Jews themselves, with the organized Resistance playing little part in helping to save Jewish lives. As he concludes, “the resistance remained silent even as genocide on an unprecedented scale was being perpetrated.”8 British military historian M. R. D. Foot, in a highly acclaimed study of the phenomenon of resistance across Nazi-occupied Europe, went even further in 1977, when he wrote, “Tremendous efforts were made to save Jews, many of them by Jews, many of them by resisters”—as if the two were mutually exclusive categories—but reinforced Wieviorka’s point by stating that the rescue of Jews was “not the brightest page in resistance history.”9
How resistance can be defined, therefore, depends on a number of disputed factors. It could involve (1) rescue and other activities dedicated to undermining or avoiding the will of the occupier; (2) military combat (only); or (3) the former with no assistance from those engaged in the latter.
Yet a fourth possibility also exists. As Wieviorka notes, the Jews themselves were anything but passive, and they should not be likened “to minors unable to take their own fate in hand.”10 Many escaped on their own without organizational support, enlisting the help “of family members, professional contacts, or friends.”11 Under such circumstances, some Jews expressed their own form of resistance—in this case, resistance to what the Nazis intended to be their ultimate fate. What was the significance of such behavior? British historian Robert Gildea has expressed this clearly: “The majority of the Jewish population in France, which was progressively excluded from society and then faced destruction, fled or hid rather than resisted. But with less to lose and fewer hiding places, communists, Jews and foreigners had greater incentives to resist than the average French person.”12 What this translated to, Gildea concludes, was that “it may be more accurate to talk less about the French Resistance than about resistance in France.”13
Defining resistance was thus as complex during wartime France as it has remained to the present day. It should be obvious, however, that it encompassed more than the fighters who confronted the Nazis in combat, more than armed cells engaged in guerrilla warfare tactics, more than the agents of Britain’s Special Operations Executive or the American Office of Strategic Services, and more than Charles de Gaulle’s Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (French Forces of the Interior, or FFI). Rather, resistance must be viewed as the widest expression of anti-German and anti-Vichy endeavors designed to nullify the dictates of the occupier or the collaborator.
The perspective of Canadian historian Lynne Taylor illustrates the position regarding the exclusive nature of an armed resistance as the only form of opposition to the Nazi occupation. For her, the story of the Resistance “is the story of a few thousand brave souls who refused to admit defeat, who were determined to continue the war and drive the Germans from French soil.”14 Her discussion examines the underground press, sabotage, and military options; where she refers to rescue, however, the focus is on assisting Allied airmen and the like to find sanctuary through being smuggled through France and into neutral countries. The rescue of Jews is not mentioned; for Taylor, this did not constitute resistance as it did not have as its object a singular, straightforward, goal: “to liberate France.”15
Written Out of History?
Doreen Rappaport is an award-winning author of books for young people. Her website relates that her focus is on topics “that celebrate multiculturalism, the retelling of folktales and myths, history, the lives of world leaders and the stories of those she calls ‘not-yet-celebrated.’”16 Arguably her best-known work is Beyond Courage: The Untold Story of Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust. Unlike many academic texts written for adults, Rappaport has no hesitation in including rescuers among those to be considered resisters. Indeed, she dedicates an entire section of her book, titled “Saving the Future,” to precisely that topic, including subsections on Georges Loinger and Marianne Cohn.17 While not unique within the literature of resistance or rescue, Rappaport’s book is a rare example of the two being synonymous. (In this regard, it must be said that Lucien Lazare’s important volume, Rescue as Resistance: How Jewish Organizations Fought the Holocaust in France, defines the entire theme.)
It is a truism that when resistance is mentioned in the context of World War II or the Holocaust, more often than not, people’s thoughts do, indeed, turn to some form of armed conflict. A few brief examples will suffice. In Margaret L. Rossiter’s study from 1986, Women in the Resistance, the focus is on women who helped facilitate the escape of Allied military personnel, spying and espionage, sabotage and guerrilla operations, and women from overseas (particularly the United States) who made a commitment to the anti-Nazi struggle.18 In Marie Rameau’s Des femmes en résistance 1939–1945, a collection of personal accounts from women who participated in France’s fight against Nazism, all were involved in the same sort of activities covered in Rossiter’s volume19—and none engaged in the kind of rescue activities recounted in this book.
Finally, in American author Margaret Collins Weitz’s volume Sisters in the Resistance: How Women Fought to Free France, 1940–1945, not only does the author showcase women who engaged in battle, but she also highlights the ways in which the struggle took place—as couriers, translators, nurses, and in maintaining the underground press. Though Weitz does offer a brief treatment of the women who engaged in rescue activities—which she somewhat dismissively refers to as “support services”—her handling of those occupied in rescue actions is wildly inaccurate. She places Marianne Cohn, for example, as having led 28 children to the Spanish border (not Switzerland), where two-thirds were able to cross (none were in fact able to do so until after Marianne’s death and the war was effectively over), while she asserts that Marianne’s grave was discovered on D-Day (not many weeks later, as it was), with her body so badly beaten that “only her shoes enabled her brother to identify her” (Marianne did not have a brother but rather a sister, Lisa—who was not present when Marianne’s body was found).20 References to rescue organizations in Weitz’s book focus only on CIMADE, though none of the other organizations (Catholic, Jewish, or nonsectarian) profiled in this volume are mentioned.
Similarly, some histories do not even recognize rescuers when perhaps it would have been advisable to do so. British author Agnes Grunwald-Spier, for example, in an investigation of women’s experiences during the period of the Holocaust, makes no references to the rescue of (or by) Jewish women at all.21 A otherwise excellent and detailed recent study by French historian Jacques Sémelin entitled The Survival of the Jews in France 1940–44, while true to its title in many ways, does not spend as much time on passeurs conveying Jews across the border—whether to Switzerland or Spain—as the topic would have warranted. His conclusion is an important one, however, noting that the difficulties involved in smuggling people across borders “reminds us how precarious individual destinies were,” with many accounts suggesting “that people were painfully aware of their extreme vulnerability.”22 While this is far from a reason not to offer more on border crossings, it does, nonetheless, explain the fragility of the topic in a larger study of Jewish survival in France during the war.
What, then, can we say about those who rescued Jews by smuggling them across the Swiss border and to safety? Even several regional histories do not mention the rescuers, while focusing closely on armed combat (or preparation for it) from those loosely grouped as maquis.23 It is as if the rescuers—in their capacity as resisters—have disappeared down a memory hole. Rescue, for many, did not equate with resistance; and thus, those engaged in the dangerous—sometimes fatal—practice are in peril of being written out of history. As Renée Poznanski has written, while rescue actions could cost the lives of “young social militants” such as Mila Racine and Marianne Cohn, “this rescue was not recognized as an entirely independent element of the Resistance except, of course, in the Jewish world.”24
Rescuing the Rescuers
There are, however, some writers who do give due recognition to the passeurs. Lazare has already been mentioned. Elsewhere, perhaps the most significant study is by another resister, Anny Latour, who, writing in 1981, argued that while “there was the French Resistance, which covered itself with glory,” she could also speak of “another elite: those who, subjected to the torments of shame and humiliation, awakened to their Jewishness and rose up against the Nazi enemy as Jews.”25 For Latour, all due credit had to be given to the French Resistance, which was essentially “political and military.” But, she wrote, “If we Jews had not created rescue networks, tens of thousands more unfortunates would have fallen into the hands of the Vichy police and the Gestapo, and been sent to the death camps.”26
Were these actions, therefore, resistance? For Latour, unquestionably: “These networks did not materialize out of thin air, but had their origins in Jewish social services and groups of varying political leanings already in existence prior to the Occupation.” However, the threat of danger led these agencies to go underground, at which time they “became resistant.” This was achieved through “giving shelter to children and adults, inventing a thousand forms of camouflage,” and in so doing, “they thwarted the enemy’s infernal machinations.”27 They moved, in short, from being social helpers to being rescuers—and then, by definition, to becoming resisters.
What this translates to is a view of resistance that is at significant variance with the notion of resistance as combat alone. And with this we arrive at what contemporary scholarship refers to divided memory.28 The connection between past and present is tangled, and far from straightforward. Historians and others today often speak with near-reverence of the distinction between history and memory, as though one is so divorced from the other that the two have little relevance for each other. But when looking at French history during World War II (indeed, at practically any aspect of that conflict, anywhere), we realize that it was arguably the most traumatic, contentious, and problematic event for France during the 20th century. And in the aftermath of the Allied victory and the direction of postwar discourses emanating from the supporters of Charles de Gaulle and the Free French movement relating to how the war was won,29 a dominant discourse relating to resistance—the Resistance (with a capital R)—all other manifestations of anti-German opposition assume secondary importance.
The issue therefore becomes one of who shapes the memory of the anti-Nazi phenomenon in France, especially as it has become institutionalized as an ongoing military struggle of defiance across the period 1940–1944. Within that public space, is there any room left for collective remembrance of the rescuers, and if so, how is that to be manifested? There is a need to reconsider the relationship between what might be termed the “official” act of remembrance and those who fall outside of it.
The reconstruction of France after the war resulted in a narrative arguing that the liberated country possessed a united resistance against forces that were imposed by the German occupiers acting in conjunction with collaborators who did not represent the “real” France.30 Consequently, there was little room for duplicate narratives from Jews, communists, or other major actors. The only way in which their contributions could be recognized was through localized forms of remembrance and an alternate historiography—such as that from Renée Poznanski with which this chapter began—and which many of those mentioned throughout this book have echoed.
In view of this, what can we say that actually is beyond dispute? We have been looking in this study at several quite remarkable young women who, seeing the vulnerability of Jewish children, refused to allow that vulnerability, and that Jewishness, to be a cause of their death. And an emphasis should be placed on the youth of the women under discussion. If we take as a base 1940, the year of France’s defeat, we are struck by their ages: Andrée Salomon was 32, Madeleine Barot was 31, and Rolande Birgy was 27. After that point, we find ourselves discussing teenagers or those only barely out of their teens. In 1940, Geneviève Pittet-Priacel turned 22, and Vivette Hermann turned 21. Mila Racine was 19, Marianne Cohn was 18, and Charlotte Sorkine, the baby of the group, was just 15 years of age. All, of course, would grow older beyond their years as a result of their activities in the war, and by 1943 and 1944, they were seasoned workers in the field of rescue; in this context, their actions can certainly be read as resistance. Their means of fighting differed from that of military combatants, but their struggle—and willingness to pay the supreme sacrifice—was no less deserving of the name.
What, then, is so special about this topic, given that it is a subject of divided memory within France, omission on the part of some historians, and ignorance within the wider population? What we have witnessed in this book are the stories of ordinary young women who made extraordinary efforts on behalf of their fellow human beings in a time of the most horrible darkness. Whether or not they were aware of it, we can say that they showed remarkable courage and set a moral compass for others to follow. As written by historian David Diamant: “These young people, in great numbers, became martyrs.” He identifies especially Mila Racine and Marianne Cohn but adds others also deserving of mention: Eugene Bass, Léopold Waksman, P. Kipper, Norbert Finkel, Suzanne Kraika, Lol Rappoport—“dead due to deportation.”31
Remembering the Passeurs
How have they been remembered? Indeed, does anyone remember them today? The short answer is yes, though this is much more on a local than a national level. The case of Marianne Cohn is, once again, instructive. By way of example, we can show how she has been remembered, both as a resister and as a rescuer. On May 3, 1984, prior to the 40th anniversary commemorations marking the liberation in 1944, the chief rabbi of France, Rabbi René-Samuel Sirat, visited Annemasse. After meeting with M. Borrel, the mayor of Annemasse, and enjoying lunch with various leaders of the local Jewish community, a party of dignitaries led the chief rabbi to a monument to Marianne that had been created at Ville-la-Grand, close to the location of her murder. In the presence of “a strong delegation of former resistants and widows of resistants,”32 as well as the chief rabbi of Lyon (Rabbi Richard Wertenschlag) and local luminaries, a public address was made by Herbert Herz, a veteran of the Resistance and a member of the armed Manouchian Group during the war. He reminded the audience of Mila Racine’s counsel to always have hope no matter what, and then offered a prayer that Mila and Marianne “remain united in remembrance as they were in action.”33
Then, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the liberation on August 18, 1994, survivors of the Pax Prison—the Jewish children saved by Marianne’s refusal to abandon them at the cost of her own life—gathered at the monument to Marianne at Annemasse to honor their savior, recognizing, at the same time, “the courageous intervention of Mayor Jean Deffaugt.”34 Monuments and memorials to the rescuers exist throughout France, even though, as we have seen, there is some ambiguity in respect of the legitimacy of claims to their status as resisters. This book’s core position is that no one can be left in any doubt as to the credentials of the passeurs in this regard; they were, unquestionably, every bit a part of the anti-Nazi resistance as those who took up arms and fought a courageous military struggle for the liberation of France.
And while there are monuments to rescuers, there are also monuments to the victims. In Annecy, the jumping-off place for so many rescues during the Vichy collaboration, the Italian interregnum, and the German subjugation, there is today a monument not too far from the Hôtel de Ville. Built into a rock, the plaque bears two statements. The first remembers those who the passeurs did not manage to rescue, erected by the city of Annecy “in tribute to its missing children in Nazi concentration camps and fascist prisons so that their memory remains alive in the city.” The second statement is a direct condemnation of Philippe Pétain’s collaborationist État française: erected in the name of the French Republic, it states that it has been created “in tribute to the victims of racist and antisemitic persecution and crimes against humanity,” which took place “under the authority of the so-called ‘Government of the French State.’” The words do not reference those who undertook rescues; they do not have to. They show simultaneously that the victims are recalled and that those who made them victims are to be reviled. Anything else, in that context, would seem to be excessive.
Back to the Future?
With the end of the war, Vivette Hermann—married on October 1, 1942, to another aid worker, Julien Samuel, and mother to a daughter, Françoise, and a son, Jean-Pierre (another daughter, Nicole, would be born in 1948)—threw herself into the work of repatriating and resettling the Jewish children who had been saved as a result of her and others’ efforts. As she recalled, the OSE office in Paris found itself engaged in “immense activity,” as everything had to be rebuilt, the office was short of personnel, “their needs were enormous, but the future was secure.”35 She then did a quick tabulation of the situation of Jewish children in France by the end of the war. Altogether, 11,600 Jewish children had been deported, “all of whom perished in the camps.” Despite, this, 72,400 under the age of 18 survived. Some 62,000 managed to stay with their parents or were entrusted by them to institutions or non-Jewish families. The most vulnerable population, however, were Jewish children of foreign background—and of these, Jewish organizations were responsible for transferring between 8,000 and 10,000 to safety in Switzerland and Spain, to countries overseas, or to placement with friendly non-Jewish families within France.36 She concluded that “it must be assumed that it was easier for families born in France or of French culture to shelter their children,” but that it was “the children of foreign families that the OSE had to take charge of and hide.”37 And with that, the situation prevailing for Jews during the interwar years—in which the community was divided into French-born “Israélites” and foreign-born “Juifs”—was both reinforced and confirmed.
Reflecting on her work as a rescuer of Jewish children during the years of the German occupation, Vivette made the conscious decision to move ahead with her life and not dwell on the past or turn it into the focus of her future. She did not want to define herself by what she had lived through, at the same time never forgetting the experience of the war years. As she wrote in the memoir that has been featured throughout this book: “I’ve decided to turn the page, not to forget but to learn from the past and to struggle against today’s evils, which are the same as those of yesterday—exclusion, rejection, and intolerance.”38 She then decided to commit her recollections to paper as “an inheritance” and “a history to transmit.” She wanted “to bring its actors to life, to testify about the response necessary in the depths of the night, and to affirm—for all times and all places—the absolute primacy of life over death.”39 No more fitting tribute could be made to the passeurs, and all those with whom they worked, than this.