Les Enfants et Amis Abadi on Radio J

June 17, 2009

On June 17, 2009, Andrée Poch-Karsenti and Victor and Marthe Kuperminc recorded a programme on Radio J. Marc-André Charguéraud (writer) was present in the first part of the programme.

Charguéraud’s books deal with the attitude of the “witnesses” of the persecution and then the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. They are syntheses based on reading hundreds of books, most of them from the English-speaking world. This work of reflection brings out many new perspectives that open up debate on a good many “received ideas”.

These books will interest the general public by giving them, in a concise and clear form, all the information needed for everyone to form their own opinion. For students, they will be a valuable source of very many references. Finally, even historians will be challenged by new approaches to familiar situations.

Marc-André Charguéraud is a graduate of Sciences Po and holds a law degree (Paris). He holds a Master of Business Administration (Harvard). During the Second World War he volunteered for the French First Army in 1944. He later ran and chaired several companies in France, Germany and Switzerland. From August to November 1942, at Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, he took part in protecting Jews fleeing the arrests in Lyon. In the months before the Liberation of Paris, he had to live in hiding for two reasons: first, because as a refuser of the Compulsory Labour Service in Germany he had only false papers; and second, because his father, a senior Foreign Affairs official who had resigned, was on the Gestapo’s lists of people to be arrested in the event of an Allied landing.

Marc-André Charguéraud has written a new book, “Le Martyre des survivants de la Shoah, 1945–1952”, and the interview was most interesting.