Who Will Rescue Us? The Story of the Jewish Children who Fled to France and America During the Holocaust, by Laura Hobson Faure, Yale University Press, 432 pp, £20, ISBN: ‎978-0300269963.

Historians often see themselves as myth-busters. They bring the sharp eye of scholarship to bear on mistaken historical views or narratives that have been constructed to legitimate political systems or to make claims based on identities. There is, however, a difference between revisionism within an academic environment, in which scholars generally abide by agreed rules, and challenging a myth fabricated in wider society and endorsed by idiosyncratic historians. It is in light of these challenges that we need to understand the intervention by Laura Hobson Faure.

For context, we need to go back many years. On July 16th, 1995, the newly-elected French president, Jacques Chirac, made a paradigm-shifting speech at the commemoration of the round-up of 13,000 Jews in Paris by the police of the Vichy regime, working on orders from the German occupying authorities in 1942. Those arrested were held in atrocious conditions in the Vélodrome d’Hiver stadium before being deported to Auschwitz and other camps where they were murdered. For a long time after the war this had been a private remembrance by the Jewish community, but then it became a public event. Now, for the first time, Chirac said, the French government took responsibility for ‘the irreparable wrong committed that day by France, home of the Enlightenment and the Rights of Man. Going back on its word, it handed over its protégés to their executioners’.

At this point he flipped the message. The deed had been done by the Vichy regime, but the French people were innocent. There was another France, moved by a sense of justice and altruism, that was without sin because it had done its best to save the Jews from arrest and deportation.

‘Of course there were wrongs, there was a collective wrong. But there was also France, a certain idea of France, upstanding, generous, faithful to its traditions and its genius. This was never at Vichy. Neither was it in Paris. It was in the Libyan desert where the Free French were fighting. It was in London, embodied by General de Gaulle. And, one and indivisible, it was present in the hearts of French people, these ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ who, in the darkest days of the war, and putting their own lives at risk, as Serge Klarsfeld has said, saved three-quarters of the Jewish community in France, and exhibited their best qualities. Humanistic values, the values of liberty, justice and tolerance, that underpin French identity and commit us for the future.’

In real time, whether they were aware of it or not, the French were witnessing the fabrication of a new myth. Many of them would have been brought up on the narrative of French Resistance, which had sought to redeem the French from the shame of defeat, occupation and collaboration during the second World War. At the Liberation of Paris in August 1944, General de Gaulle had announced that although active resisters against the Germans and the puppet Vichy regime had only been a minority, they had been supported by the vast mass of ‘good’ French people, while only a ‘handful of wretches’ had collaborated with the enemy.

The myth of the resistance reached its apogee in 1964, when the remains of Jean Moulin, who had been sent by the general in 1942 to unify the internal French Resistance but died at the hands of the Germans, were translated to the Panthéon, the hall of national heroes. After that, it lost its lustre. Following the death of de Gaulle in 1970, resistance leaders descended into fratricidal struggle. One of them denounced Moulin as a communist agent. Meanwhile the Communist Party, which claimed to have led the popular resistance to the Germans and lost 75,000 martyrs to the cause, was discredited by Mosco Boucault’s 1985 film, Terrorists in Retirement, which argued that the communist resistance had been spearheaded by communists of foreign (and often Jewish) origin, who had been sent by the French party apparatchiks to their deaths. On top of this, Marcel Ophüls’s 1969 film, Le Chagrin et la Pitié, banned from French television until 1981, told a sorry story of how most French people, far from being ‘good’, had been cowardly and even treacherous during the occupation.

In parallel, the story of resistance was gradually displaced by the Holocaust as the central story of the second World War. Historians are divided about how soon and how much the Holocaust was debated after the war, but when the Communist Party interred ashes brought from Auschwitz in Père Lachaise cemetery in 1946 to honour 180,000 ‘victims of Nazi barbarism’, it conveyed the message that these were communist deportees, not Jews. In 1978, however, Serge Klarsfeld, who at the age of eight had hidden in a cupboard while his father had been arrested and sent to Auschwitz, was president of the Association of Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees from France and he published a Memorial of the Deportation of Jews in France. This calculated that of the 300,000 Jews living in France at the outset of the war, 75,000 of them – 51,000 foreign Jews and 24,000 French Jews – were deported to death camps and all but 2,500 of them killed. This was followed in 1985 by Claude Lanzmann’s film, Shoah, which chronicled the full horror of the Holocaust for French audiences.

These two factors came together in the 1987 trial of Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief in Lyon, who had been tracked to Bolivia by Klarsfeld and his wife, Beate, and extradited to France to face trial. Klarsfeld acted as prosecuting council, while the defence was headed by the anti-colonialist lawyer Jacques Vergès. Barbie was alleged to have tortured Jean Moulin, who died en route to Germany, but Vergès further besmirched the French Resistance by alleging that Moulin had actually been betrayed by fellow resister Raymond Aubrac, alleging that after an earlier arrest he had been recruited by Barbie. The central accusation against Barbie, however, was that he had rounded up and deported to their deaths 44 Jewish children in hiding at Izieu, east of Lyon, on April 6th, 1944. And as Klarsfeld asserted at the trial, ‘the fact of being a Jewish child condemned you to death more surely than any act of resistance’.

The Barbie trial was a turning point. The narrative of the French Resistance was rewritten, no longer as a military and patriotic struggle against the German occupier but as a humanistic struggle against Nazi ideology and the mission to save persecuted Jews. In 1992 Barbie’s headquarters in Lyon was given over to a Centre d’Histore de la Résistance et de la Déportation, under the direction of Sabine Zeitoun, who had published on the rescue of Jewish children under the occupation. The same year a new Resistance Foundation was set up to ‘combat the falsifiers’ of the resistance story and to pass on ‘the common heritage championed by all resisters’. It was accompanied by a sister organisation, Memory and Hopes of the Resistance, through which the children and grandchildren of resisters would pass the flame to younger generations of French people.

Meanwhile, the narrative of the French rescue of persecuted Jews gained momentum. The ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ was a title conferred by the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem on a small number of Gentiles who were shown to have saved Jews from deportation. Beginning in 1963, the list grew slowly to 33 in 1987, after which it ballooned to 153 in 1989. The concept of the ‘Righteous Among Nations’ was then nationalised and popularised. A law of July 10th, 2000, introduced by Jewish socialist deputy Daniel Markovitch, inaugurated a day of remembrance of the Righteous of France. A Memorial de la Shoah, combining museum, archives and place of pilgrimage, was inaugurated in the Marais in 2005, with a wall listing the names of all the Jewish deportees, and a Wall of Righteous on the outside, along an Avenue of the Righteous of France, added in 2006.

On January 18th, 2007, Chirac was accompanied by Holocaust survivor and former minister and president of the European Parliament Simone Veil to unveil a monument to the Righteous of France in the Panthéon. He distinguished between an elite of Righteous Among Nations, honoured by Yad Vashem, and those anonymous people who helped to save three quarters of the Jewish prewar population from deportation and death. ‘The majority of Jews who were murdered were handed over to the Germans by Vichy and by collaborators,’ he underlined. ‘But most of the Jews who were saved were saved by French people.’

There now began a race to find and commemorate these anonymous Righteous. An association of Anonymous, Righteous and Persecuted of the Nazi Era (AJPN) was founded in Bordeaux in 2007 and a Network Towns and Villages of the Righteous of France was launched in 2010. One of the first to sign up was Saint-Amand-Montrond, where on a rainy day in May 2010, the mayor, whose predecessor between 1971 and 1983 had been Maurice Papon, convicted of crimes against humanity in 1998, half joked that the occasion would help to wash away the town’s inglorious past. Towns and villages lined up to be included, totalling 139 in 2022. In November 2018 I rather naively agreed to speak at a conference on resistance in Vichy, of all places, and the following year it too unveiled an Avenue of the Righteous.

This movement to rewrite the histories of the resistance and the Holocaust now acquired its own historian. Jacques Sémelin, who trained as a psychologist and political scientist before he became a historian, published an excellent work in 1993 titled Unarmed against Hitler: Civilian Resistance in Europe, 1939-1943. He was asked by Veil in 2007 to examine how three-quarters of the Jewish population in France had survived. His book, The Survival of the Jews in France, 1940-44, took issue with Marrus and Paxton, who chronicled antisemitism in the Vichy regime and French society, and with the French-Israeli historian Renée Poznanski, who argued that persecution uncoupled Jews from French society and left them to fend for themselves. He highlighted the cases of intellectuals such as Stanley Hoffmann, who had survived the Holocaust and expressed gratitude to those who had helped them. He argued that Jews had been saved by an infinity of small gestures by French people, whom he categorised as guardian angels, hosts, forgers and smugglers – some doing it for money but most out of altruism, animated by Christianity, the republican tradition or patriotic spirit. ‘These gestures, whether small or large,’ he concluded, ‘cannot be called acts of resistance, in the generally understood sense of the term, since they were not born of an organised political will to fight, with or without weapons. It is nonetheless tempting to qualify them as a form of resistance.’

This thesis has been challenged by Hobson Faure, an American from Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania and professor of American heritage at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. She did her doctorate at Sciences Po in Paris, during which time she was Sémelin’s research assistant. During that time she felt unhappy about his research methods and his political drive to rewrite French history in a way that rescued the French public from suspicions of cowardly or treacherous behaviour during the occupation. As a PhD candidate, and then looking for a lectureship, she was unable to critique such an influential figure. Even now, as a tenured professor, she is reluctant to take on Sémelin directly. Instead, she says in a footnote that historians don’t know how many Jews were living in occupied France when the deportations began, making the magical 75 per cent untrustworthy. She adds that ‘rescue provides contemporary European societies a way to talk about the Holocaust without confronting state and societal complicity in genocide, shifting the focus to a more positive, feel-good narrative’. Significantly, she omits Sémelin’s book from her bibliography.

What Hobson Faure offers is an entirely different approach to the question. It is a microhistory of 500 Jewish children who fled Germany and Austria after the pogrom of November 9th-10th, 1938, and were on a Kindertransport to France, rather than the 10,000 who went to Britain and eventually found their way to the United States. Of these 500 she has identified and followed 292. Whereas most historians of persecuted Jews in France trace their flight to Switzerland or Spain, she follows them across the Atlantic and argues that ‘policies made in New York, Boston and Philadelphia affected Jewish children’s lives in occupied France, especially those interned in French camps’. She traces the unfolding of their situation stage by stage, from 1938 to the defeat and German occupation of northern France, which drove them south, down to the frantic attempts to get them out of France when the Germans pressurised the Vichy government to hand over Jews from the Free Zone. She highlights the role in rescue of women such as Andrée Salomon of Strasbourg, who emerged from her private, middle-class existence to take in Jewish children transferred from Frankfurt, Berlin or Vienna, moving them on to Paris and to the Free Zone. Baroness Germaine de Rothschild gave over her château of La Guette to house Jewish children and then, herself fleeing to the United States, raised funds and pressurised the authorities to get her charges out of France. Most importantly, Hobson Faure gives agency and a voice to the Jewish children. They are portrayed not as helpless victims but as agents who sought to keep in touch with their families left behind in Germany or Austria, to build relationships with ‘ship sisters and brothers’ with whom they were fleeing, and to organise plays, concerts and even parliaments in what she calls children’s republics in their care homes.

At the centre of Hobson Faure’s analysis of rescue and survival are the Jews themselves. First, the families, who made decisions about what to do with their children, separating from them if need be, and calling on distant relatives where possible. Then there were the Jewish networks, primarily Germaine de Rothschild’s Jewish Committee for Children from Germany and Central Europe (CIE) and the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE), which had been founded in St Petersburg and moved to Berlin in 1922 and to Paris and Geneva in 1933. Finally, there were the ‘mixed’ Jewish and non-Jewish organisations, such as the United States Committee for the Care of European Children (USCOM) and the American Joint Distribution Committee or Joint (JDC), which worked closely with Quakers of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and Unitarians. A single Jewish family, such as the Gossels of Berlin, contacted and were helped by all these organisations. The father, a magistrate, was sacked by the Nazis in 1933 and the mother, Charlotte, was reduced to selling cosmetics. They divorced in 1936. Charlotte got her sons, Peter and Werner, born in 1930 and 1933, on to the last transport to France on July 4th, 1939, and they were cared for in OSE’s Chateau de Chabannes. She then wrote to a Jewish friend in St Louis, Missouri, to liaise with USCOM about getting her sons to the US. USCOM worked with OSE, which selected Peter and Werner, not least because of their good behaviour, and they arrived in New York on September 22nd, 1941. Charlotte Gossels remained in Berlin with her sick mother and was sent to Auschwitz in February 1943. Hobson Faure interviewed Peter and Werner in 2015.

There is no mention of the ‘little gestures’ of French people in this analysis. It may be that an ordinary French person tipped off someone in these networks about approaching Germans, but the whole business of evacuating Jewish children was bureaucratic, subject to quotas and required exit and entry visas. There was also antisemitism, even among Jews. When Andrée Salomon tried to enlist the help of the Alliance Israélite Universelle for taking Jewish children from Germany in January 1939, she was told by Rabbi Liber that France could not take more refugees, and peace with Germany took priority over Jewish needs. This was precisely the policy of the appeasing foreign minister Georges Bonnet, who was also contacted. A committee set up in Nîmes to monitor conditions in camps where foreign Jews were interned, chaired by Donald Lowrie of the YMCA, was heavily dependent on Quakers, but AFSC’s European director, Howard Kershner, met Pétain on several occasions and was more interested in supplying food to the camps than saving Jews. Ernst Papanek, the director of OSE homes who arrived in New York in September 1940 and found work as a dishwasher, tried to persuade USCOM to bring over Jewish children. He was frustrated by the fact that, to avoid provoking antisemitism, USCOM was dedicated to bringing over all children at risk, including Spanish republican children, even though Jewish children were in far greater danger. To be fair, when mass roundups and deportations began, USCOM secured 5,000 children’s visas in October 1942 from the state department, and OSE and the AFSC worked around the clock to select Jewish children. But, under pressure from the Germans, French premier Laval refused to grant them exit visas, and when the Free Zone was occupied on November 11th, 1942, the door was closed. While 5,000 visas were offered, only 280 Jewish children got from France to the US, which was only 28 per cent of the unaccompanied Jewish children who got in during the war. OSE homes like Chabannes, which had provided shelter for Jewish children, now became traps for arrest and deportation. Hobson Faure calculates that of her 292 Jewish children, at least 36 were deported to Nazi camps. Arguably, this was a survival rate of 88 per cent. But this was not the result of small anonymous gestures, rather the toil of families, networks and organisations working together. And, as she says, ‘well-intended individuals and organisations can do little when faced by the crushing nature of state-sponsored genocide’.

There is no doubt that Hobson Faure’s book will be well received in Britain and the US. It is impeccably researched. The lack of material about the persecution of Jews in French archives, not so much looted by the Germans as destroyed by the French state after the liberation, is compensated for in the rich archives of the AFSC, Joint and Holocaust Memorial Museum in the US. She combines what she calls ‘near-sighted’ or contemporaneous sources – letters, diaries, drawings – with ‘far-sighted’ sources – memoirs and 52 individual and group interviews, sometimes interviewing the same person more than once. How it is received in France is another matter. It is not easy to challenge the French Resistance myth, which has shifted from being military and patriotic to humanitarian and ecumenical. Sémelin is a powerful and well-connected historian who has helped to develop this myth and provides academic cover for the Righteous of France industry, which has taken off like wildfire, congratulating ordinary French people in their localities for saving so many Jews. One scholarly monograph, however straight its aim, will need to be taken up by the academic community.