The Jews had lived quietly and unobtrusively in Paris up until the Vichy government replaced the Republic, and the systematic selection and categorization of Jews began. Created by the government of Philippe Pétain and controlled by the French police, anti-semitic propaganda circulated freely. Many of the French citizens were unduly influenced by the powerful Vichy regime, which persuaded them to accept Nazi control. As early as October 1940, a set of laws for the Jews in France to follow had already been established. In effect, they were required to register with the local police, and by doing so, virtually lost their rights as citizens of France. Jewish children over 6 years old were sent to school wearing the yellow six-pointed Star of David, as a mark of shame, to further identify and segregate them from the rest of the populace.

By August 20, 1941, massive citywide raids were rounding up thousands of these so-called “undesirables, and housing soon became a problem. A convenient solution was to include the low cost public housing project, La Cité de la Muette in the suburb of Drancy located about 4 miles from the center of Paris. Although La Cité had not been fully developed, Drancy had been used as an internment camp as early as 1939, and it was easy to incorporate the partially constructed buildings of La Cité as temporary housing From a public holding place for criminals, the Roma people, and other outcasts of society, Drancy now became an interim detention center, a barbed wire, heavily guarded camp managed by the French police and SS Captain Dannecker. Full control of the camp was eventually turned over to Alois Brunner, the righthand man of Adolph Eichman, who served as the administrator from June 1943 until its liberation. (Brunner, a recognized Nazi war criminal, was responsible for sending over 140,000 Jews to the gas chambers.)

At times, over 4,000 Jews were crowded into an area designed for only 700 people, where they were treated like animals, subject to the most inhumane brutality and substandard living conditions with little food and water. Families were immediately separated, as long lines of women and men were loaded like cattle onto boxcars. While convoy after convoy of human freight left Drancy for Auschwitz, children starved and died, and those left behind awaited an unknown fate and despaired of ever seeing their relatives again. Some 40 prisoners, former members of the Resistance, failed in a desperate attempt to escape through a 115-foot tunnel they had dug, which was soon discovered by the Nazis. Of the 70,000 or more Jews who were brought here, it is estimated that only 2,000 managed to survive the nightmare of Drancy.
As Hitler’s megalomania raged on, so did mass genocide and the size and frequency of these raids. No Jew was exempt, and no distinction was made among the registered and non-registered, the commoner, or the prominent citizens of France such as Max Jacob, Tristan Bernard, and Rene Blum. By far, the most infamous of these raids was the Grande Rafle du Vel’ d’hiv when an estimated 13,000 Jews were rounded up on July 16 and 17, 1942, and herded into the Vélodrome, a large sports stadium. From here, they were further categorized and sent to Drancy and other detention camps.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the Vel’ d’hiv was in the number of children who were taken before their lives had hardly begun. The age limit of 16 or over had been changed, and in less than three months’ time, 6,000 or more children of all ages were collected and eventually put to death. On occasion, a few young boys were handpicked from the camp and sent to schools and training as future Nazi soldiers. The notorious SS Lieutenant Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon,” sent over 300 young boys, ages 14 to 19, which he had taken from a children’s home, to Drancy and on to the gas chambers.

Fortunately, the insanity of Hitler’s “final solution” ultimately failed, but not before at least 25% of the Jewish population in France were virtually eliminated. Some years after the war had ended, only a few attempts were made by the French government to make amends and recover from the overwhelming embarrassment of this deplorable time in the eyes of the world. Even before WWII began, however, the French regime had offered refuge to those fleeing from Franco’s Fascist Spain, but then later turned them over to the Nazis for extermination. Although Petain and many others who were put on trial claimed no knowledge of these events and the persecution, it is hard to refute what history has told us.

In 1976, a Polish Jew Shlomo Selinger designed an interesting statue consisting of 3 large blocks to be erected on Charles-de-Gaulle Esplanade. There is considerable significance and reference to the Jewish religion and culture in the intricate details of his sculpture, including the letter Shen for Shaddai, the words used over doorways of Hebrew homes to signify God or the Guardian of Israel’s Doors. Ten figures in the center of the statue represent the gates of death, with 10 being the required number for religious prayer. Two more at the top form the letters for Lamed and Vad, which combined represent the Lamedvavniks, the 36 who save the world from destruction. Two sets of 7 steps, representing the degrees of Hell, lead to the “path of martyrs” and across the street to an old freight car that features an exhibition narrating the tragedy of deportation.

Years passed and still there was no apology from the French government until 1994 when former President Mitterand authorized the construction of a memorial to be sculpted by architect Azagury and Walter Spitzer, whose family had survived deportation. In a special tribute to Vel’ d’hiv, the statue features a sick man, a pregnant woman, and several children. The words on the monument are worth noting: “The French Republic in homage to victims of racist and anti-semitic persecutions and of crimes against humanity committed under the authority of the so-called ‘Government of the State of France’.” Since 1995 when Chirac formally acknowledged the guilt of the French police and others who collaborated with the Nazis during the Occupation, the president of France has held a ceremony here each year.

Visitors to the former camp at Drancy will find only a small area of public housing, as much of the Vélodrome was destroyed by fire in 1959, and what remained was demolished. In May 2001, the Minister of Culture, Catherine Tasca designated La Cité de la Muette as a national monument, which houses a small conservatory of documents, a few memorial plaques including one to Max Jacob, and three more collectively dedicated to 100,000 Jews and other French and British soldiers held at Drancy.

Further tributes to Holocaust victims in France can be seen in the Wall of Names, dedicated in 2005, which is located at the entrance of the Shoah Memorial in Paris. The stone wall is engraved with the names of 76,000 Jews who were deported to Nazi concentration camps from 1942 – 1944, and of these, over 11,000 were children. The Memorial serves as the Centre for Jewish Contemporary Documentation, and is dedicated to the Unknown Jewish Martyr, with a crypt in the basement that holds ashes of only a few who died in the death camps.

Within the Memorial, small family photographs and drawings made by the children are the saddest part, perhaps, of it all. These are the faces of children who were victims of terror and the tragedies of war, faced with the unimaginable loss of parents and family, and the horrors of punishment and death. Surrounded by circumstances beyond their control, many too young to understand, they lived in fear of what lay ahead. For the few who did manage to survive, their lives would never be the same.

Shoah Memorial, 17 rue Geoffrey l’Asnier, Paris
Hours: Sunday – Friday, 10am to 6pm; Thursday to 10pm. Closed Saturdays, national, and Jewish holidays – April 9 & 15, May 1 & 21, & July 14th.
Admission: Free
Guided Tours: Free on Sundays (in French), 3pm, second Sunday of the month (in English). Handicap accessible, book/coffee shop, underground parking nearby.

A visit to Drancy will remind us all that evil does exist in this world, and tragedies such as this can never be forgotten

Sharon L. Slayton

The KZ Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp was home to a rock quarry that the prisoners were forced to work in.  The effects of malnutrition left the prisoners underweight and weakened.  These prisoners were forced to carry rocks weighing up to 100 lbs up 186 stairs, known as the “stairs of death.”  They were forced to climb one directly behind the other so that when one would collapse, they would fall back onto those behind them and cause a domino effect.  If they were unable to work or to complete their tasks they were either shot, beaten to death, or taken to the gas chamber. 

The number of people who where killed at KZ cannot be proven definitively because the Nazi’s attempted to destroy all records when they left the camp in 1945.  However, through eyewitness accounts and records kept by those who worked at the camp it has been determined that somewhere between 180,000 to 300,000 people lost their lives. 

The KZ camp was the last to be liberated at the end of World War II.  When the U.S. Army arrived to liberate the prisoners, the prisoners affected a small amount of revenge upon their tormenters when they turned on the approximately 30 guards who remained and hung them. 

The torture and murder of hundreds of thousands of prisoners led to the installation of a museum at the camp.  Today, people from all over the world go through the museum to learn more about the people who lost their lives there.  The hours of operation are Tuesday – Saturday from 10 am to 2 pm.  They offer explanations in German and English and have descriptive flyers in Polish, French and Italian.  The point of the museum is to remind us all what happened there and why we can never allow it to happen again.  For more information about the museum you can contact the KZ Gusen Visitors Center by telephone at ++43 7238 2269 or online at http://www.gusen.org/ – The site provides detailed information about the history of the camp, the current museum tours and much more.

Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, was chosen for its proximity to the railroad lines, where prisoners, rounded up from every part of the country, were transported in cattle cars and dropped off by the trainloads at Auschwitz III.  Here, they were selected and separated from their families to exist as laborers under the most inhumane conditions or to be immediately eliminated.  Others were chosen for chemical and physical experimentation.  Birkenau, the larger of the two camps, covered 425 acres, with 300 buildings that could house up to 200,000 prisoners.  Four brick buildings, with gas chambers and ovens, were added to speed up the process of mass murder as more and more Jews were seized and deported.

During the years immediately following WWII, it took some time for people, other than the survivors and relatives of the victims, to attach much credibility to the ongoing news reports of Auschwitz and other similar concentration camps.  Such stories were met with shock and disbelief; how could such things have happened.  For many of us, it wasn’t until the criminals responsible for these atrocities were put on trial that we finally faced the terrible reality of the Holocaust.  On Jul 2, 1947, the Polish Parliament combined two of the Auschwitz camps in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the third camp was subsequently destroyed.  Auschwitz I and II have been preserved for the millions of tourists who come each year to view the Museum and Birkenau, the largest Jewish graveyard in the world, where the ashes of over a million victims were scattered across the fields.  People from every country and every religious faith have shared in the sorrow and relived the nightmare of Auschwitz.

Over the entrance to the main gate of the camp, we read the irony in the sign, originally placed there by Rudolph Hoess, whose villa and garden where his children played stood next to one of the crematoriums.  The words, “Arbeit Macht Frei,” translate to  “work will set you free.”  The Jews were, in fact, not brought here to work; they were brought here to die.  What spiritual release he was referring to in such “work” is beyond our comprehension.  As we walk through the area, we listen to a flow of information given by smiling, friendly tourist guides.  The scene is one of horror, where abandoned suitcases, prosthetic limbs, human hair, children’s shoes, eye glasses, and empty Zylon B gas canisters are piled together, grim reminders of the mass graves of so many innocent people.  We pass the gas chambers, the experimental lab, the sterilization ward, one of the four crematoriums, and the incoming ramp to the ovens where the original metal rollers are still in place.  We can somehow hear the cries of the dying and feel the grief that is all around us.

Where does one look in such a place, where there is nothing to see, but the reality of a tragedy that should never have occurred?  We can only contemplate and reach out in spirit, as we remember and hope that the darkest days of history will not repeat themselves.

Auschwitz was designated a UNESCO heritage site in 1979 and to date over 25,000,000 have visited the site.  Tourist hotels in Krakow are only an hour away and guided tours, advisable for groups, can be arranged for 3 1/2 hours, or one and two days.  Admission is free and the Museum is open seven days a week during the following hours: 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., December through February; 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., March & November; 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., April & October; 8:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m., May & September; and 8:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m. June, July, & August.

Sharon L. Slayton

A tour of the Anne Frank Museum brings to life the harsh reality of one of the cruelest periods in history.  We follow this incredible story through the Diary of Anne Frank, a tragic and true diary written by a once carefree, 13-year old Jewish schoolgirl.  The Anne Frank Museum houses a remarkable collection of letters, postcards, photographs, and objects recovered  by Otto Frank and others from the Secret Annex.  They reflect the memories, the fear, and the plight of just one of the untold numbers of Jewish people in wartime.

The Anne Frank Museum is located at Prinsengracht 267 in Amsterdam, Holland.  Open daily from 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. and March 15 – September 14, 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.  Exceptions:  January 1 and December 25, 12 Noon – 7:00 p.m., May 4 and June 24, 9:00 a.m.  – 7:00 p.m., December 21 & 31, 9:00 a.m.  – 5:00 p.m.  Closed on Yom Kippur.  Admission (in Euros):  Adults:  7,50; ages 10-7:  3,50; ages 0-9:  Free.  The purchase of evening tickets, recommended for avoiding long lines and immediate entrance, can be purchased in advance at Amsterdam Tourist Offices and the Amsterdam Uitburo.  A separate facility, adjacent to the historic building, includes a museum store, cafe, and information desk.

Sharon L. Slayton