“Hidden children and deportation” week
January 7 to 11, 2008
Round table of January 12, 2008: How and what should we pass on today?
– Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat: Thank you for coming to this round table, which concludes this week on hidden children and deportation. Personally, on behalf of the Cours Morvan and on behalf of the ADJS, I want to thank everyone who took part in this week, and to thank from the bottom of our hearts, on behalf of us all, Aude de Saint-Loup, who wanted to organise it.
We have the immense honour of having among us men and women for whom I have as much respect as admiration and – you will forgive me for saying so – affection.
Ambassador Stéphane Hessel, a very young resister, deported, escaped, later appointed ambassador, who played an essential role in the subjects we will come back to shortly.
General d’Astorg, deported to Dora after resisting, a man who is the guardian angel of the Cours Morvan and of the association Avenir des Jeunes Sourds. He was 19 when the events we are going to discuss began.
Mr Bertrand Herz, who is with us despite health problems. He forms an unexpected link between the history of deportation and the history of hidden children. Very briefly, his story: hidden with his family, he was arrested and deported at the age of 13 to a concentration camp for 8 months. He experienced the camp at Buchenwald and its surroundings.
Mrs Andrée Poch-Karsenti, one of the 527 children saved by the Marcel network, founded by Odette and Moussa Abadi, whom you have been able to discover through the exhibition and the film. She is also the author of the only book ever devoted to this network; we can never thank her enough for doing work that no historian had seen fit to do before her. It is the witnesses and survivors who set the example.
Jeannette Dreyfuss, also a child who was saved; she was six when she was saved by a resister from the very start, who was himself arrested, then tortured by the Gestapo, and who died in deportation. Thanks to Jeannette’s work, this man was recognised as Righteous posthumously.
Beside me is a painter whose work some of you may have seen in the exhibition. It is an extraordinary work, of rare depth and restraint. It takes a certain effort to enter into these images, but Jean-Marc Cerino wanted above all to bear witness to the witnesses, not to take a voice that did not belong to him.
The theme of our discussion is above all educational: “Why and how should we pass it on?” The fact that this week was organised by the Cours Morvan and the ADJS, devoted to the education of deaf people, explains the presence of the interpreters you see here.
To begin with, a personal reflection: I was struck by how very young the people around this table were at the time – between three and 23 years old – which shows that this was a story of very young people, the age of our secondary school pupils. Those who saw the exhibition will have seen that 14 was the age of the youngest Righteous, but also of some of the children saved, who ranged from a few months to 14 or 15, and of the youngest deportee.
Our debate is on the theme: what should we pass on, why and how? Let us start right away. I turn to General d’Astorg: with your experience as a resister, a deportee and a witness, I am always struck by the energy you put into addressing young people and all audiences. I always wonder why – where does this eternal youth and eternal passion come from: what do you want to pass on, and why?
– General d’Astorg: Why, more than 60 years after these events, is it still necessary to talk about the history of the Nazi crimes? These crimes were committed in a highly civilised country in the very heart of Europe, the land of Goethe and Schiller. I will try to explain why.
The SS and the members of the repressive organisations were probably ordinary men to begin with, but men who from their youth had been perverted by a mad ideology that made them believe they belonged to the elite of the nation, that they were of the master race, the superior race that had to be preserved from all defilement.
Those who belonged to the so-called inferior races – Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals – were to disappear en masse.
Opponents, and those rounded up in the occupied territories, were nothing more than subhumans who had become the slaves of the master race, destined to die at work, of exhaustion, hunger, disease and lack of care.
Immediate death in the gas chambers or on the pyres, slow death in the concentration camps. That was the choice of death meant for the camp prisoners.
No remorse, no compassion from these masters who machine-gunned en masse, who fed the ovens or the pyres, who sped up the pace until men collapsed under their burdens – who, in short, were doing a normal job.
Before the Nuremberg tribunal, these men spat at the court in answer to the question of their guilt: “not guilty”, with total contempt for the victims, whose films and photos they had been shown and whose harrowing testimonies they had heard.
Most of these men never changed their opinion about that era. As proof, more than 30 years after the end of the war, I can cite my meetings with prisoner number 7, sentenced to life imprisonment, Rudolf Hess.
As head of the French Military Government in Berlin, my duties included going to Spandau prison to check on the presence of the man who had been Hitler’s secretary and one of the authors of Mein Kampf. I never heard a word of repentance from him; indeed, he claimed each time that he was being held illegally. How many are there, or were there, in Germany today who escaped the courts, enjoyed a peaceful retirement and went on remembering the time when they were the masters?
Already we see gangs of young neo-Nazis trying to take control of certain towns and infiltrate the governments of the Länder. In the federal government, voices are heard calling for executioners and victims to be remembered together, for subsidies to memorials to be cut, for Nazism and communism to be lumped together. The terrible punishment inflicted on them by the Allies serves them as an alibi for complaining about the suffering endured by their population.
What about France? Antisemitism is not dead, even if it has lessened in intensity: fewer cemeteries vandalised, fewer synagogues defiled, fewer schools burnt – but what is really going on in people’s minds?
Racism takes advantage of favourable circumstances to grow, exploiting communitarianism, which excludes and turns into withdrawal. Discrimination on grounds of race or sex at work is an obstacle often cited in recruitment.
Worse, well-organised revisionist and negationist currents of thought are trying to rewrite the history of those terrible years and even to deny the existence of those “details” that led to so much suffering and death. I have held in my hands a cassette, circulated under the counter, denying the existence of the gas chambers.
I have no intention here of making today’s Germans feel guilty, especially the younger generations; but they cannot reject their history – they must take responsibility for it and not act as if it had never existed. This is all the easier for them now that the immense network of informers that the Gestapo and the police had deployed throughout Germany has disappeared. The fear that reigned over that country and the occupied territories has vanished.
But we must not let similar circumstances one day produce the same effects.
We, the oldest, will soon be gone. That is the natural law of the renewal of generations: so who will come and bear witness, who will come and warn against the dangers that may be smouldering in the most unexpected places? So we implore you to remain attentive and vigilant. We hand the baton on to you so that oblivion never covers memory; thanks to you, it will remain alive; from today you in turn become witnesses, with all the responsibility that entails. We are counting on you.
Faced with these thousands, these millions of dead without graves, you cannot forget them. Keep them in your memory with respect. You are free in a free Europe. In their memory, as Primo Levi said, let us not make them die a second time by no longer speaking of them.
You hold a republican and democratic weapon to oppose the abuses I have mentioned: the ballot paper. Use it in time and wisely, and keep as your rule of conduct the principles set out in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. How many of us have read it? Do not forget that we can not only oppose intellectually, but also act – following the example of those who took risks in those years.
– Mr Dauzat: One senses a certain anxiety in your testimony; I think of what Moussa Abadi said in his lecture at the Senate: I am afraid of tomorrow, I am afraid of what is going to happen. I would like to give the floor to Bertrand Herz, who experienced deportation as a child.
Something struck me: the reaction of the other children on the day Mr Herz was forced to wear the yellow star. I would like you to talk about this episode and the lessons you draw from it. What did it teach you? How could it help enlighten our pupils today, the young ones and probably the older ones too, since we have realised that adults are even more in need of education on these questions?
– Mr Herz: Before telling you my memories of wearing the yellow star, when I was 12, in Paris, I would like to add to what Bernard said that, in fact, talking about deportation and the persecution that preceded it means trying to convince young people. It is not about recounting suffering, but about convincing young people of certain values and forms of behaviour directly linked to good citizenship. I always give the example of my classmates at secondary school: in Year 8, in 1942, from May onwards I wore the yellow star, and when I arrived at school with it, most of my classmates and teachers chose to ignore it, while a small number of my classmates went with me on the way to Saint-Lazare – we lived in the suburbs – to stop me being insulted, and at one point five or six of them put on a paper star with “potache” written on it, the slang word for schoolboys. We went down the rue d’Amsterdam to Saint-Lazare with the paper stars, until some adults told us it would be better to take all that off.
I tell young people this, and I say to them: you see, my classmates – you don’t know, perhaps their parents went to see that exhibition, “The Jews and France”, which said the Jews were causing the ruin of France… So I tell the young people I talk to now: perhaps their parents were antisemitic, they didn’t know what a Jew was, but when a classmate is marked, that is when young people react. So I tell them: know that towards your classmates you must always have the attitude that some of my classmates had during the Occupation – that is, absolute respect for one’s classmate, and thereby respect for everyone around us, whatever their religion, their origin and so on.
I insist a great deal on this, on the solidarity I benefited from. I have no illusions, I am not naive; I know that during the war, during the Occupation, there were denunciations and acts of cowardice, but I think we can still tell young people that by refusing to accept the violation of human rights in the form of inflicted humiliation, we are fighting Nazism and fascism.
Ambassador Hessel, a two-part question for you after the previous contributions: first, quite simply, do you share this anxiety?
Secondly, an aspect of your biography that seems interesting concerns the theme of passing things on. A very young resister, deported, escaped, after the war you worked for the United Nations, including on the Declaration of Human Rights, a declaration of optimism and faith in humanity. Sixty years later, are you still as optimistic? Does the text you helped draft seem to you just as useful for educating children, young and old?
– Stéphane Hessel: Yes, the answer is clearly yes. I do not keep an optimism that nothing would justify, for we live in a violent, brutal world. We should have learnt from the appalling example of Nazism that the world can only progress if it banishes violence once and for all – above all violence carried to the level of brutality and refusal of all respect for the human person that my comrades and I experienced, and of which Mr d’Astorg has given us a remarkable account. Yes, I am convinced – not out of optimism, but out of conviction – that in human beings, in each of us, there are infinite resources of courage and solidarity, and that we who lived through that period must make the young generations we are addressing here aware of the humanity within them, which must allow them to put an immediate stop to any renewal of violence and brutality.
A few weeks ago I spent a few days in Weimar, the city of German culture, of Goethe and Schiller – but also the city 10 km from which lies the Buchenwald camp, one of those where appalling things were done.
Our meeting there was about saying: beware of beginnings. We were told: be attentive. Keep your ears open and your eyes open; when you have good eyes and not much hearing, be very attentive. When you have good hearing and poor eyesight (as I do), be very attentive, for we must detect the beginnings of groups that start saying: it never existed, or: ah, those were the good old days for Germany, or for fascist Italy, or for Stalinist Russia! As soon as we see that kind of action beginning, let us remember that fortunately, after the war, the United Nations was set up. Read the United Nations Charter, drafted in 1945. Read, three years later, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which sets out everything that is owed to the free, personal, human, dignified individual.
That is the message I want to pass on to those I am lucky enough to have before me, whom I thank for listening to an elder who believes that what he lived through is still valid today.
Thank you so much for this testimony of hope.
I was struck this week to hear our deported resisters say that it was not simply a matter of bearing witness, nor even of resisting, but that one also had to act. They acted, naturally, by resisting, by escaping, and then throughout their lives by trying to bring their history and their commitment into line, right up to today; Mr Herz’s classmates acted too. Bertrand Herz does so today through his work with the International Committee of Buchenwald-Dora and Kommandos.
Odette and Moussa Abadi were people whom nothing, a priori, drove to take the risk from the very first day; they saved 527 Jewish children and basically devoted their lives to helping the destitute. They did it in silence; they acted, but never wanted to bear witness themselves. It took years for the children they saved, those known as the Abadi children, to find their rescuers again and persuade the couple to speak.
Andrée, in your opinion, why did they not bear witness – did they feel that they had acted when they had to, and that now it was up to you to bear witness, since it was time to testify to the actions of the people to whom you owe your life?
– Mrs Poch-Karsenti: Odette and Moussa did indeed decide very young to get involved, not to stand by and “watch the procession go by”, as Moussa used to say. Their commitment was immediate, without hesitation. As early as 1939, Odette had already gone to the border to help the Spanish Republicans; she was already in revolt against injustice done to human beings. She was a rebel of her time, with no particular affiliation, political or religious. She was a young woman doctor and found herself unable to practise medicine. With Moussa, her companion at the time, she decided to join the Resistance. Life is made of chance circumstances that sometimes help us take decisions. Moussa met an Italian priest, chaplain to the Italian troops in Russia; the accounts of antisemitic persecution affected Moussa and Odette so strongly that they decided to act. We must not forget that they were both Jewish and equally in danger, but for them the most vulnerable were the children, so something had to be done to save the children. The two of them alone were not enough. On their way they found Monseigneur Rémond, Bishop of Nice, but also Pastors Gagnier and Evrard and secular institutions, who all held out a hand and helped them create this network.
Why did I in fact want to pass something on – I who had thought all my life that I had little to pass on, except a few values to my children? I did not think I needed to tell my story, which was not exceptional, until, quite by chance, I met Odette and Moussa, unaware that they had played such a fundamental role for me.
Yet they never disappeared entirely for two of the children they hid, who were the oldest children: Jeannette [Wolgust], who is here today and who, throughout her life, somewhat intermittently, always kept in touch with Odette and Moussa. We owe largely to Jeannette our knowledge of Moussa’s and Odette’s actions, for she pushed them hard to circulate a list of the names of hidden children.
When I was lucky enough to meet Odette and Moussa, when I had the joy of becoming part of the circle they kept around them, when they did me the honour of adopting me a second time, and when I lost them, leaving me an orphan for the second time in my life, I wanted to make known the deeds that these exceptional people had kept in the shadows, even from their dearest friends. In this room there are long-standing friends of Odette and Moussa who never knew what honourable acts their friends had accomplished. Perhaps they can tell us about it afterwards. But I wanted to give something back, to return a little of what I had been given. I want them to go on living beyond their death.
And behind all this – I am no longer very young – my children have assured me that they will take over. The words that Odette and Moussa never released will continue after us.
– Mr Dauzat: You will have noticed that we have imperceptibly moved from direct testimony to testimony by the witness of a witness. Many of our deportees remained silent until the day they decided to become witnesses. Andrée is passing on to the next generation the baton handed to her by Odette and Moussa: this brings us to the problem of passing on, and to the difficulty of sharing the unique experiences of all the witnesses around this table, and of making the younger generations understand that the problems and horrors lived through by that generation are still relevant.
Witness to the witnesses – you are one just as much, Jeannette Dreyfuss, since through a very particular set of circumstances you found yourself in the château of a deeply Christian family who took you in. The man was a resister from the very start, and his Christian faith dictated respect for the human being.
This man, this Righteous man, was arrested by the Gestapo, deported and tortured, and died in deportation. Years later, you wanted to go back there to bring this story back to life, to bear witness to your own story, but just as much to the story of this family. You took all the necessary steps to have him recognised as Righteous. I would like you to explain the deeper motives behind this testimony and why it was so important for you to have this couple recognised as Righteous.
– Mr Dauzat: Many people who saw the exhibition asked us quite naively why Odette and Moussa were not Righteous. The expression “Righteous Among the Nations” is an ancient, biblical expression. The Righteous are the non-Jews who behaved righteously. It is urgent to make them known and to recall their example.
We move to another generation with Jean-Marc Cerino, who very quickly asked himself, in his work as a painter, what could be done to keep unique testimony visible and, at the same time, to bear witness to the witnesses without speaking in their place: that is the whole difficulty: we younger people, who did not live through that history directly, cannot relate our own experience; so other means must be found. This brings us to the question of how. I would like to begin with Mr Cerino’s testimony: how did he feel this urgency? Why did he choose this indirect means? Some who saw the exhibition said: what are these blank pages?
– Jean-Marc Cerino: Thank you for giving me the floor. The idea of passing the baton between witnesses is important. Several people have spoken of the urgency of passing on something of memory, without it becoming an injunction either, but rather something that could happen naturally. For this passing-on to happen naturally, there must also be an encounter – that is essential. That is why the work done this week and today with this round table seems important to me.
In my case, it did not come from a family history, but rather from meeting someone, Violette Maurice, one of the first women resisters in Saint-Étienne, who came from a family of academics; the whole family decided to join the Resistance in response to de Gaulle’s appeal. At that time, few people took that decision.
Violette is an important person, because all her life she would bear witness, going into schools and elsewhere to testify. She was arrested in 1943 for resistance and interrogated in the Gestapo prison in Lyon. She was deported. She is one of the women who came back alive from that experience.
Another characteristic is that she bore witness early. She set down the testimony of her experience in a book.
As a young man, I met her and made a filmed interview in the archives of the Museum of the Resistance in Lyon. At the end of the interview, she showed me a little notebook she had kept from the camps, in which fragile sheets of paper sat side by side with poems, recipes and drawings by a friend who died in the last months of the camp. Hence the idea of being a witness to the witness: on the question of the Holocaust, it seemed to me that the only right approach was to start from the drawings made by the deportees. It would have been indecent to start from photographs, because photographs, however accurate they may be in a certain way, were always taken by the people who liberated the camps: journalists, British, Americans, etc.
The first French museum of its kind, the Museum of Deportation in Besançon, has a large collection of original drawings. The work I have presented is a set of drawings I made starting from those drawings by the deportees.
When I collected these drawings, I made no distinction between drawings by Jews or by resisters. We have deported resisters, deported Jews, Jewish children hidden by non-Jews. This is the first time I have sat at a table where there is no sectarian rivalry, and I thank you for that.
And we also thank the head of the Cours Morvan for that.
I suggest we open the microphone to the floor. I would like to quote a sentence of Moussa’s, in which he explained to the Abadi children and others, at the Senate: Be attentive to what is happening around you; there are hidden children, you owe them something. Do not forget that people are being killed near your homes. And if you do not have the means to act, cry out, scream…
Tonight I do not want to scream, but I would just like to raise my voice to say how sorry and outraged I am to see certain excesses in the media. The witnesses often tell us how anxious they are when they think of their own approaching death while seeing revisionism being born. And in the universities and the press we see the idea emerging that the time of the witnesses is over and the time of historians and men of letters has come – as if one could write the history of Auschwitz as one wrote that of Austerlitz.
Instead of helping, of doing work on the Lycée Condorcet, on the Dora camp, on the Abadi network, on committed Christians, the French State today is funding a history institute that sponsors theses on the sex life of the Nazis during the Occupation, on the “black hunters”, or where we are told that to understand Nazism we have to understand hunting, or that we should be interested in the use of bladed weapons under Nazism: all this is deeply revolting; we must fight it vigilantly, and find ways of interesting young people – not in the voyeurism of the executioner. For even if the witnesses disappear… everyone can be a witness to the witness.
What means is it legitimate to use to teach children to see clearly while there is still time?
Here we have witnesses whose ages at the time of the events ranged from 3 to 23; in other words, it really is a children’s story. What matters today is education.
– Georges Soubirou. I was arrested in 1943 and ended up at Dora, two weeks after Mr d’Astorg. Among us deported resisters there were also a number of comrades who were Jewish without the Germans knowing; I want to salute them.
I want to drive the point home: when I was liberated after the war, I would gladly have accepted Germany being wiped off the map, and later I asked myself: but why the Germans? Why did these people, with a culture equal to ours and a civilised heritage, behave like that? They were victims of manipulation, of propaganda, etc.
We must not forget that it did not fall from the sky: this propaganda served someone well. There were economic powers behind it all. Many things have not changed; we are in similar situations today; we can fall victim to manipulation and brainwashing for reasons that are unacknowledged but very real.
– Dauzat: Mr Hessel, you were born in Berlin; part of the question concerns you directly.
– Mr Hessel: What our comrade has just said seems to me very important and very useful. We must see that the way Germany lost the First World War, and was then put in a harsh situation for its inhabitants, made it susceptible to two things: the possibility of being manipulated by a skilful, manipulative orator, as Hitler was, but also the support given to Hitler by part of German industry, which told itself: this is the only way for us to recover. This industry benefited from the slave labour of us deportees. At Auschwitz it lived off the work, in abominable conditions, of Jewish and other deportees – just as we ourselves, at Dora, worked for the great industrialists of Germany.
One of our comrades, Charles Palan, was at Auschwitz and has written a book entitled Je crois au matin (I believe in the morning), which is about to come out and for which I wrote the preface. I would like to mention it because he tells us, very movingly, of his journey through Auschwitz and the work there, but he also tells us what became of him afterwards, what he did in the organisations that fight against what is scandalous and unacceptable in some of our government’s behaviour towards immigrants and undocumented people – and that too is the legacy that we who knew the horror must keep, and point out wherever it is found…
– Jeannette Wolgust: Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat, you spoke earlier about the little-known Jewish resistance. I wanted to mention a book about the Jewish resistance in France. It was written by a very old gentleman of 98, Georges Loinger, a resister from the very first minute, who did extraordinary work taking Jewish children from France to Switzerland. In this book, all the Jewish resistance movements are mentioned, including the Abadi network.
Thank you for that clarification. I would point out that what is true for France is also true for Russia, Poland and Ukraine, where the first resistance networks were Jewish – but this is not often known, whereas every book shows the Jews going to the slaughter like sheep, when in fact they were committed.
That phrase is unbearable!
Yes, we must be careful about the words we use. We must recall this work. Since the media prefer to talk about indulgent books about the executioners, there is a tendency to forget this simple, everyday heroism – this page of history which is both Jewish history and the history of France.
– N. K. (from the floor) I am a hidden child too. I am not going to tell you my life story.
When I was 16, I joined the Resistance organisation in Paris, the “Union de la Résistance Juive”, which had taken over from Solidarité. Solidarité was created in September 1940.
Solidarité’s first task was to send activists into the Spanish refugee camps to get the Jewish veterans of the International Brigades out, to help them escape by supplying papers and money, and some of those who escaped played a considerable role in the armed struggle. It would take too long to tell you the whole history of Solidarité. It was the first Jewish resistance organisation created in France. If you take for example… I don’t know if you know what the MOI was – an offshoot of the French Communist Party to look after the various immigrant populations who came to work in France. During the Occupation there were several sections (Italian, Spanish, Jewish…). I am here because I wanted to see the film about the Marcel network. I came back today to say that in addition to all the networks, there was the one organised by Solidarité, from which at least two children – Jeannette and myself – benefited; hundreds of children were hidden in all sorts of unusual places, a château for example. Personally, I was with a poor French peasant, and as he had nowhere for me to sleep, I slept in the same bed as his son.
I simply wanted to point out that Solidarité was the union of Jews for resistance and mutual aid, which published tens of millions of clandestine leaflets and newspapers during the four years of occupation, and which is hardly ever mentioned any more – which is extremely sad. Their acronyms have virtually disappeared from a great many talks. Our chairman was very glad to recall that there was a Jewish resistance: Solidarité was active in Lyon, Nice, Toulouse, Agen, Roanne, Grenoble, Marseille and elsewhere. We must talk about it because they were ordinary people – most of them immigrants who spoke very poor French. When a Frenchman helped to save a Jewish child, he was in his own country; but when people who were already risking their lives just by walking down the street, instead of looking only after their own lives, went on working to save children – telling in detail the story of the rescue of children by Solidarité is important.
I am very moved and very happy to have heard everything I have heard. I am a hidden child too. I would like to add to what has been said about hiding children. A very important organisation, the OSE (Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants – Children’s Aid Society), which goes back a very long way, did tremendous work during the war; it still exists today with other functions. It is an organisation with a Jewish leadership. They too hid and saved many Jewish children, and they are part of that Jewish resistance which, alas, is too often passed over in silence and is still not well enough known.
– Victor Kuperminc. I am the husband of an Abadi child and also a member of the Yad Vashem committee. The work of Yad Vashem, mentioned by two of the speakers, aims to award the title of “Righteous” to non-Jews who saved Jews. There had been talk of giving the title of rescuer to Jews who saved other Jews. The title was never really settled… There had been talk of the French government giving a title to those Righteous who are Jewish. By definition, you are right, the notion of the Righteous is a biblical reference: they cannot be of Jewish origin, since the reference is purely biblical.
– Dauzat: Precisely – since it is difficult to celebrate the memory of these exceptional people, so discreet were they, the Cours Morvan decided to bear witness in its own way in order to try to pass on this experience. I hope this has been understood, and you, the Abadi children – I think you have understood that it was a way of bearing witness today and of passing the baton to the children. The children of the Cours Morvan were proud and touched that so many of you came to talk to them about Odette Abadi, who had passed through their school.
How can we pass it on, how can we make the generations aware of these questions? All week I was struck by the extreme concentration and attentiveness of the secondary school pupils who spent two or three hours in the exhibition and talked with the hidden children. Unfortunately, the adults who came, apart from those directly concerned, did not stay more than ten minutes. The children hear the message; the adults – and unfortunately adulthood starts very early – no longer hear it. What must we do today to be heard? We have put up a plaque, we have organised this week. We had a lot of people, a lot of children. Let us hope we have sown seeds and awakened these children to values, but help us make the next generations understand today that the testimony you bear is essential for the generations to come. If anyone has any advice for us, please help us.
– Stéphane Hessel: I’ll always have a go. Yes, you are right, it is not easy to make people who are already caught up in their lives and their activities understand that they have something to gain from the testimony of those older than themselves, especially in our so-called Western civilisation, where respect for the old is not widespread. When old people travel in Africa, for instance – it has happened to me throughout my life – because they are old, people listen to them; they say: since he is old, he surely has something to give us. In our countries, people say: since he is old, he probably has nothing left to say. So how can we communicate? We must use the means of today: the Internet, television, slightly populist little stories. Too bad – let us use those too. That is why, every time one of my friends who experienced deportation writes a book about it, I immediately offer to write a preface. That is what I am doing for Charles Palan – it’s good publicity for me too…! It is still possible today to interest even those who are fully caught up in life, provided we give them something to their taste – closer to a story, possibly even a bit of fun. Never mind if it is only a passageway beyond which one must find emotion again. Emotion is something that strikes people, even adults. If we manage to arouse emotion – emotion that is also linked to what is happening to us today, for today we face tragedies at least as heavy and serious as those we are recalling here – we must connect the tragedies of the past with those of today, and then the emotion gets through, at least I hope so.
I am quite moved, because memories are crowding in; I have a lot to tell, about many things. I forgot to mention one thing. There should be tens of thousands more Righteous. Everyone knew that Jews were being hidden, and these are stories we do not know. Those people do not talk about it. When the war was over, I went back to see the family who had sheltered me for a year. The family said to me: good, are you well? We’re fine too. You’re from the town, we’re from the country… They thought what they had done was normal. They were poor people, peasants, sharecroppers, who received money from Solidarité. Solidarité’s activists sprang into action; they avoided leaflets (there was no Internet, no telephone) – dozens of activists went to warn Jews. That certainly had an effect: of the 25,000 Jews who were to be arrested, there were only 12,000 arrests.
Hundreds of thousands of French people took risks to save others, especially foreigners and immigrants, for even antisemitic people did so – and that is not talked about enough. Fortunately there is now the Resistance competition, which has chosen as its theme the people who saved others, whether British, American, Jewish, etc.
– Another hidden child speaks. A remark about psychology: a psychology magazine a few months ago asked the question: is the moral sense innate in human beings? The answer was yes, because human beings react with compassion to the suffering of others. I saw a film on Arte about the education of the Nazis. They interviewed Nazis who had escaped conviction; they had been educated against compassion, towards the Jews in particular. This has been documented.
So we must try to educate children as fairly as possible, develop their capacity to think, and make sure they are not systematically manipulated by advertising and propaganda. It is possible; it is up to parents to see to it. I would like to stress that there is an education to be given to children that would be very useful for the population of France or other countries to know about.
– Bernard d’Astorg: Throughout this week, I accompanied classes and adults through the exhibition on deportation and, in the next room, the exhibition on hidden children. I would like to come back to what Hessel said earlier: we must try to develop emotion in young people, in schoolchildren. With them, emotion comes easily. They are stunned by what they see. They do not understand, but they are stunned. Adults, on the other hand – 20, 30, 40 years old – think they have enough experience to dissect what they see, or at least they barely believe it; in any case they say: it couldn’t happen again! They do not believe evil exists. I had great difficulty drawing these adults into a more realistic view of the exhibition, whereas with the children it was very emotional, but very easy.
– Bertrand Herz: I do not want to answer the questions; I would simply like to give my opinion on how to pass it on. A few thoughts. The first thing I note is rather fortunate: since we live in a technological age, there is a great deal of video and audio material on the deportees. I have often heard interviews with deportees, particularly from Auschwitz, and personally some of them overwhelmed me. Fortunately there are many documents which one day, together with other material, will make it possible – not to replace direct testimony, but at least to make up a little for the disappearance of the deportees.
The second thing is that, in my opinion – we have talked about adults and young people – it is true that we must reach young people, essentially in secondary schools. Personally I think that the problem of testimony and of passing on values, of resistance and deportation, of anti-racism, etc. – the way of conveying all this to young people – can only be solved if we decide to have history teaching that lives up to what one can expect in France.
I have read comments in some human rights journals saying that young people do not always distinguish between what is real and what is imagined, given the flood of documentaries and fiction on television. We must set the record straight as far as the history curriculum is concerned.
Third thing: from my experience over the past ten years, there are associations of former deportees and children of deportees, on the Jewish side as such and on the side of deportation in general, and of the Resistance in particular; there are many associations that are joining forces and are very active in this field, through trips and exhibitions, doing a great deal so that we can go on conveying these values to young people even when we are gone.
These are thoughts and wishes; in any case, a lot of work is being done on the question.
– Robert Pouderou: I am a friend of the Abadi couple. I am a theatre director. I would like to come back to the Resistance competition. At the Collège Montaigne in Périgueux, I had the opportunity to work with young people on this theme, in particular on deportation. I wrote a tragedy to make them experience what the history of deportation had been. At first the Year 10 kids (14, 15 years old), at that awkward age, tended to laugh, and then they entered a more emotional phase and put on an important show. They performed it in front of their parents and friends – unfortunately three quarters of those pupils’ parents were missing. That said, we must not give up on this kind of experience. In education, we ought to work on this memory and increase the links between artistic activities and history teachers – but there still has to be the will at the very top.
– General Louis Garnier: Two things. Certainly, it’s the children we must work on – the parents are a lost cause! I wanted to ask a question: I didn’t want to read Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones), but I had to. The novel has real literary value, but given that the main character is an executioner, sexually deviant, and above all the murderer of his mother, his best friend and three other people, I naively thought – being hardened myself – that it would be obvious to everyone that he was a bastard and that consequently the book would serve as a warning against Nazism.
I realised afterwards that I was wrong, that this was not at all how the character was perceived by the general public, and that in the end the result was to confuse executioner and victim, to lump them together. Littell’s recent statements, moreover, rather confirm this view.
What can be done about it? Of course, Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat has written a book, Holocauste ordinaire, which I hope several people have read, but several thousand have read Les Bienveillantes. What can be done against a book like that – and it is not the only one?
– Dauzat: Who felt they had to read this book?
– Mr Hessel: Yes, I read it, of course. It is an extremely interesting book if you want to understand how the SS system worked, because it is described in detail with extraordinary brutality. If you have the courage and are prepared to read about horrors, you will understand even better how they operated. It is dissected with extraordinary precision.
– Mr Dauzat: But with some very dangerous things. The book is dedicated to the dead. And one quickly understands what it is about. The hero explains that the figures he gives are taken from The Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg – a man who can hardly be suspected of pro-German sympathies. Look at his name. Anyone who wrote that in the press would be prosecuted. Here, the novelist allows himself anything. Secondly, what bothers me is the dedication: to the dead! But which dead? There is a poem to read, contemporary with the Holocaust: The Song of the Murdered Jewish People by Yitzhak Katzenelson. This poet says: soon they will speak of the dead “in bulk”. We are in the memory of people who disappeared; it is not to “the dead” that we speak, but to one particular person, a person whose name must be restored each time. And until every name has been restored, that person will not have the burial to which they are entitled.
Forgive me for interrupting you, but I am very troubled by the idea that people think they learn something by reading this novel. There is something scandalous in this book, and the press’s lack of critical sense appals me. The author casually recounts Albert Speer’s visit to Dora. He shamelessly copied a page from the book by André Sellier, a former deportee who, with his friends, did the work historians had not done. Littell recounts this. And he says that Speer complained about the inhuman working conditions at Dora. Each time, people think they are learning something that way, and each time it is distorted. You have direct experience; you know how to tell things apart, how to recognise a lie by omission. But the others? They will not know that Speer wrote to the Reich Chancellery congratulating himself on the model factories!
My main reservation is that I think you do not give the floor to an executioner – you amplify him. To stay in the realm of literature, Peter Weiss, writing about the Frankfurt trial, managed to make the lie audible simply by “editing together” the executioner’s statements. In Les Bienveillantes, you do not hear the lie – which is why I find it dangerous, except for well-informed people like you.
– Mr Hessel: It is a book presented as the account of a pervert, and I would remind those who are less familiar with Greek mythology that by giving his book the title Bienveillantes (Kindly Ones) he is referring to the Eumenides… Orestes had killed his mother; the gods met and decided that he had also avenged his father. It is a fine story from Greek mythology. We are talking about present-day matters in which everything our chairman has said is justified, and I for my part endorse it. But in the extraordinarily diverse psychology of our contemporaries, there are resources and riches that can be stimulated by one aspect of reality or another.
In this respect, I would like to say that for me, at any rate, it was once again a recognition of the richness and diversity in which we live that children from the Cours Morvan were able to follow our proceedings thanks to that wonderful ability to turn into signs what we produce in words. It is a richness and it brings, I am sure, heightened sensitivity, and we must pay tribute to those who have the sense, the sensitivity, the intelligence and the dedication to make this important part of the humanity we live with – those who cannot hear – bearers in their turn of the essential messages we all need.