Europe

From the Liberation purges to the Barbie trial, France has struggled with the memory of the Vichy experience: a memory of defeat, occupation, and repression. In this provocative study, Henry Rousso examines how this proud nation―a nation where reality and myth commingle to confound understanding―has dealt with les années noires. Specifically, he studies what the French have chosen to remember―and to conceal.

Austerlitz is the story of a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before.

The memoir of Charlotte Delbo, a French writer sent to Auschwitz for her resistance activities against the Nazi occupation of France and the Vichy government.

French philosopher, Sarah Kofman only inherited one object from her father, Rabbi Bereck Kofman, who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943. This pen “obliges me to write” her experiences in the Holocaust. Kofman describes the events of July 16-17, 1942 when her father was taken, her difficulties separating from her mother to go into hiding, and her relationship with her adoptive mother, Mémé, and disavowal of her Judaism at the rue Labat. Kofman committed suicide soon after completing the book.   

French Holocaust survivor Marcel Cohen reconstructs the lives of his family members murdered in Auschwitz in 1943 and 1944 through “all that I remember, and all that I could learn” about them. Each chapter is dedicated respectively to his mother, father, sister, grandparents, uncles, and aunt. Cohen, who was five years old when he last saw his family, collects in these pages all the geographic, material, sentimental, olfactory, and visual points of reference he can to fill in the silences and lacunae that surround the memory of his, largely unknown,  family members.  

On April 7, 1942, Hélène Berr, a 21-year-old Jewish student of English literature at the Sorbonne, took up her pen and started to keep a journal, writing with verve and style about her everyday life in Paris — about her studies, her friends, her growing affection for the “boy with the grey eyes,” about the sun in the dewdrops, and about the effect of the growing restrictions imposed by France’s Nazi occupiers. Berr brought a keen literary sensibility to her writing, a talent that renders the story it relates all the more rich, all the more heartbreaking.

During the Holocaust, while imprisoned at the Fresnes Prison and then later interned at the Drancy Camp, Louise Jacobson, a French Jewish teenager, wrote letters to her family and friends. Louise, who was denounced by a neighbor for not wearing the yellow star and for suspected communist activity, recounts in these letters her experiences as a young prisoner, her worries, and her plans for when she is liberated. Louise ultimately died in Auschwitz. Her sister Nadia saved the letters and comments on them in this volume.

French Holocaust survivor, Rachel Jedinak tells the story of how she and her sister escaped the notorious Velodrome d’Hiver round-up in the summer of 1942, evaded subsequent arrests, and ultimately survived the Holocaust in hiding. All the while, the girls were, as Jedinak stresses, “only children.” Jedinak additionally describes her post-war struggles to create memorials for the thousands of murdered Parisian children at their former schools.