Rescue in Southern France - Background and History
Introduction
The purpose of this document is accurately to account for the survival of Jews and other refugees in Southern France, 1939-1944.
Specifically to document the activities of the Nimes Committee -Camps Committee, Nimes Coordination Committee (Comité des Camps Nimes), and their allied organizations.
Its intention is, as completely and as accurately as possible, to produce a list of individuals and organizations who aided, provided relief for, and otherwise saved individuals by the Nimes committee who were in peril of their lives in France during World War II.
This document will be submitted to Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, for the purposes of recognizing and honoring individuals for their life-saving activities.
This document was compiled using primary and secondary source material. Numerous archives and published sources were carefully searched to compile this document.
It is an ongoing process. New names and organizations will be added when found.
We may never know the names and stories of all those who helped.
It is our hope to make this list as complete as possible.
Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed
Theis, Pastor Edouard
Theis, Mildred
The Protestant minister Edouard Theis, whose sermons contained an anti-war message, was invited by his colleague, the Reverend André Trocmé, whose beliefs and views he shared, to run the newly founded Collège Cévenol in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, in the département of Haute-Loire. When France was occupied and the Vichy regime formed, the two clergymen urged their congregants to shelter persecuted Jews, “the people of the Bible.” Le Chambon and the surrounding villages became a refuge unique in all of France: hundreds of Jewish refugees, children and entire families, were hidden in various institutions and homes until the liberation. Edouard Theis and his wife, Mildred, regularly kept Jewish families in their home until they could place them in permanent shelters and they treated their wards warmly and with dignity. On August 16, 1942, Georges Lamirand, the minister of youth in the Vichy government, made an official visit to the town. Trocmé and Theis refused to preach in the church in his presence. A dozen students in the Collège Cévenol handed him a letter stating: “We insist on making it known to you that there are a number of Jews among us. If our comrades, whose only fault is that they were born in another religion, receive the order to submit to deportation, they will disobey those orders, and we will do our best to hide them.” Within two weeks of Lamirand’s visit, a large detachment of gendarmes equipped with police vans moved into Le Chambon and began to make systematic searches. In church that Sunday, Trocmé and Theis urged the congregants to “do the will of God, not of men.” Theis later explained that he was obeying Deuteronomy 19:2-10, where God commands His people to create cities of refuge where an innocent man could find asylum “so that innocent blood not be shed in the midst of your land … so blood [will not] be upon you.” After a few days of fruitless searches, the gendarmes left the town in frustration. In February 1943, Theis and Trocmé were arrested along with the teacher Roger Darcissac and were interned for three weeks at the Saint-Paul d’Eyjeaux camp near Limoges. The camp commander pressed them to sign a commitment to obey all orders of the government and its agents, but they refused and were nevertheless released. Once released, Theis joined the underground and participated in the CIMADE escape network to Switzerland.
On July 15, 1981, Yad Vashem recognized the Reverend Edouard Theis and his wife, Mildred, as Righteous Among the Nations.
Source: Lazare, Lucien, vol. ed., Israel Gutman, ed., Sara Bender, assoc. ed. The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations: France. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2003.
“On August 23, 1942, the Archbishop of Toulouse, Monsignor Jules Saliège (q.v.) published a pastoral letter that was read in all Catholic churches in the Toulouse area and provoked many responses. Saliège urged Christians to help Jews and withhold their support from antisemitic persecution and hatred. He declared clearly: They are our brothers like so many others. A Christian may not forget it.” (Gutman, 2003)
The Holocaust in France
On September 3, 1939, France along with Great Britain declared war on Germany after the Germans attacked Poland on September 1.
At the beginning of the war, there were approximately 50,000 Jewish refugees in France, mostly from Central Europe.
On September 5, 1939, 15,000 Jewish refugees from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia were arrested and interned in French-controlled concentration camps. These camps had horrific health conditions. After 1940, the mortality rate in some of these camps reached as high as ten percent per year.
The following is an excerpt of a report by Dr. Alfred Wolff, former camp physician at Gurs (cited in Tartakower & Grossman, 1944, p. 162):
“In the first four months which these homeless people and their fellow sufferers, who had already emigrated to Belgium, Holland, and France and had now been brought to Gurs, had to pass in the damp, cold, drafty, and gloomy barracks, without light and air, with insufficient clothing and without any comforts, no fewer than 1,055 died out of an average camp population of 13,500. This is roughly 77 per mille for the total number of internees, or, if we take a three-month period, 57.75 per mille. Compared with the official mortality figures for New York, showing a death rate of 2.5 per mille in the same three months, the mortality at Gurs was more than 20 times higher.”
A report on the camp at St. Cyprien (cited in Tartakower & Grossman, 1944, pp. 162-163) describes conditions there:
“Driven by thirst, we collected the rainwater which dripped from the cover of the wagon, and took turns at drinking it… The Spaniards called this camp the hell of Perpignan. About 80 percent of them died here… The sanitary conditions defy description… dysentery and diarrhoea, etc. are the results… All kinds of diseases and death… Typhus broke out in consequence of the contaminated water. Despite prophylactic inoculations by emigrant physicians, the mortality continues… Food: in the morning, two cups of coffee; at noon, soup which sometimes contains scraps of meat, and in the evening soup again; also, half a liter of red wine a day, and about 300 grams (less than 11 ounces) of bread. Those who cannot afford to buy additional food starve by degrees… Very few have money…”
At the outbreak of war, the Jewish population in France was 300,000, with 200,000 residing in Paris. Jews comprised seven tenths of one percent of the overall population of France, which was 41,600,000.
Jews had lived for centuries in France and were well integrated into French society.
Germany invaded France in May 1940 and in a lightening campaign, defeated France by June 1940. Under the terms of the armistice, two thirds of northern France was occupied by German forces. Southern France was largely unoccupied, and was headquartered in the town of Vichy. Marshall Henry Philippe Pétain, a military hero of World War I, was made head of the Vichy government.
After the fall of France, many of the foreign Jews residing in France fled to the unoccupied zone. This included 35,000 Belgian Jews and 20,000 Jews from the Alsace-Lorraine region.
By the end of 1940, one third of Jews in France were refugees. About a third were refugees from Central Europe, one third from Belgium, and one third from Eastern Europe (Poland).
After the German occupation, treatment in the camps got considerably worse. Following is an excerpt of a report published in the New Republic on November 11, 1940 (cited in Tartakower & Grossman, 1944, pp. 163-164), which describes the horrible conditions in the camp:
“You know that I have been through four concentration camps. The three others were nothing compared to the fourth, Camp Le Vernet (Ariège), which is between Toulouse and the Spanish frontier. That is where I was interned for 16 months, from October, 1939 to January, 1941. Among ourselves we called this camp the French Dachau. Lack of food, the horrible misery, the cold, the lack of clothing and medical supplies, the complete absence of hygiene, and the restrictions, prohibitions and punishments… There were the persecutions, the physical punishments and the shootings. Inmates were constantly hit and beaten by the guards… Lieutenant Combs, commander of Quartier C from October, 1939 to August, 1940, and his men would always go around with bamboo sticks in addition to their revolvers and muskets. Combs, who was nicknamed “Schweinbacke” (Hog Face), let his subordinates beat us on the slightest provocation.”
After 1942, there were 250,000 Jews in the unoccupied Vichy zone of France. The Northern zone had 165,000 Jews.
Vichy maintained its semi-autonomous status until German troops occupied it on November 11, 1942.
Italian troops occupied eight districts in the unoccupied zone. This area became an important refuge for Jews until September 1943. As many as 25,000 Jews were protected during the early part of the war.
More than 180,000 French Jews survived the war in France. Approximately 75% of the Jews of France survived the war. This was the highest survival rate of any Nazi occupied country in Western Europe.
Numerous Jewish rescue and relief organizations operated throughout France, and in particular in the Southern zone.
The best way for Jewish and other refugees to avoid arrest and deportation by the Nazis was to leave Nazi-controlled areas. Leaving France legally was only possible between 1940 and the latter part of 1941.
Foreign diplomats in the northern occupied zone in Vichy, Marseilles and other parts of France were extremely helpful in helping Jews and other refugees to escape. Diplomats were successful in having Jews released from French concentration camps and from arrest by issuing them documents that could be used as proof of destination and an intention to leave France.
Leaving Nazi areas by “legal” emigration was an extraordinarily complex and difficult task. Refugees were required to run a gauntlet of endless bureaucratic procedures. The process required a refugee to obtain at least four documents: 1) a passport (when a passport was unavailable, an affidavit in lieu of passport might be obtained); 2) an entry visa for the country to which the refugee was fleeing; 3) an exit visa; and 4) transit visas for crossing through countries and across international borders through Europe.
Many refugees were forced to flee their home countries without proper documentation. Without papers, refugees became “stateless.” This was particularly true of German, Austrian and Czechoslovakian Jewish refugees who had fled to France.
Even for the Jewish refugees who did have documentation, these papers were often marked with a large red letter J, indicating that the holder of the passport was Jewish.
For refugees, obtaining the life-saving visas took enormous amounts of energy and time. Conflicting foreign ministry regulations and changing rules further confused the frustrating process. Many frustrated refugees committed suicide in desperation during this process.
Varian Fry, the delegate of the Emergency Rescue Committee and the International Relief Association and manager of the American Center in Marseilles, wrote (as cited in Tartakower & Grossman, 1944, pp., 156-157):
“Caught in the concentration camps of southern France, or congregated in the larger cities, Pau, Montaubon, Toulouse, Nice and, above all, Marseilles, the refugees lived in an agony of fear and apprehension. For weeks and months they believed that every ringing of the doorbell, every step on the stair, every knock on the door might be the police come to get them and take them to the Gestapo. They sought hysterically for some means of escape from the net which had suddenly been dropped over their heads. They were the prey of every sort of swindler and blackmailer. Their already badly frayed nerves sometimes gave way altogether under the incessant pounding of fantastic horror-stories and wild rumors….
“Under the strain of these alarms, many refugees committed suicide. The roll of those who took their own lives includes such men as Carl Einstein, Walter Benjamin and Walter Hasenclever, all German anti-Nazi writers. Some weeks after the armistice the body of Willi Muenzenberg, the eloquent German Communist publisher, was found, in a state of partial decomposition, hanging from a tree near Grenoble. Many less known men, and some women, died in concentrations camps, cheap hotel bedrooms, and dark, narrow streets, preferring escape through death to the unbearable strain of the terror which the defeat of France seemed likely to unleash upon them at any moment.
“Fortunately, the terror did not begin immediately, and it is a sad reflection that many of those who committed suicide might have been saved if they had only waited. In the first weeks after the armistice, escape was easy. France, under orders from Berlin, granted no exit visas to refugees, but the United States gave entry visas freely, and the Portuguese and Spanish consulates issued transit visas to all comers who had any overseas visas whatever. Once they had the Spanish and Portuguese transit visas, the refugees had only to go down to the French frontier and cross over—often with the help and guidance of the local French authorities, who had not yet been replaced by men obedient to Vichy’s orders. Hundreds left in this way…
“…In October, 1940, Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo, visited Madrid. His visit was followed by a radical change in Spanish transit visa policy. At first no transit visas were issued to Poles, or to Germans and Austrians without valid Reich passports. American ‘affidavits in lieu of passport,’ issued by the American consulates to visa applicants without other travel documents, were declared to be invalid in Spain (they had been one of the most common travel documents of the political refugees). At about the same time the French, doubtless under German pressure, tightened up their border control.”
An Austrian survivor who went to South America wrote:
“Visas! We began to live visas day and night. When we were awake, we were obsessed by visas. We talked about them all the time. Exit visas. Transit visas. Entrance visas. Where could we go? During the day we tried to get the proper documents, approvals, stamps. At night, in bed, we tossed about and dreamed about long lines, officials, visas. Visas.”
When a refugee received visas or transit papers, these documents were often time-sensitive. The refugee had to coordinate obtaining various papers and a ship’s ticket all within restricted time limits. If one visa expired, the refugee might have to obtain a complete set of documents once again.
In addition, to enter a country, refugees were required to have a large amount of cash, usually in dollars, to prove that they would not be a ward of the state. Many refugees fled carrying almost no money. Jewish refugee and relief agencies would often provide the needed cash to refugees.
In order to avoid arrest or deportation, French officials, the Nazi police and SS required refugees to provide proof that they were holding a valid train or ship’s ticket with a departure date.
Authors Tartikower and Grossman (1944, pp. 201-202) describe Vichy’s policy on issuing visas:
“…Vichy, either of its own accord or under German pressure, did make great difficulties in authorizing the departure from France of refugees and certain categories of aliens. The permit was obtained only after long months of petitioning. The regulations in regard to it changed constantly, denying permission to leave the country now to one category of persons now to another. Beginning with 1942, proof was required that the applicant had obtained not only a visa from the country of final destination, but also a Spanish or Portuguese transit visa… This often created a vicious circle for the refugee applying for an exit permit….
“At the beginning of July, 1942, in order to bar every avenue of escape to those threatened with deportation, Pierre Laval ordered the cancellation of exit permits granted months before to refugees, stateless persons, and foreign Jews hailing from countries of immigration and of Spanish or Portuguese transit visas. Worse yet, he ordered the frontier posts along the Spanish border to tighten their control and to strengthen the mobile guard border patrols.”
There were several sympathetic diplomats and foreign service officials would issue refugees the desperately needed passports, affidavits in lieu of passport, visas, identification papers and safe conduct passes. These consuls often issued these documents against the policies and regulations of their home governments.
Some of these diplomats were punished by their foreign ministries for helping Jews.
Some of the diplomats were arrested by Nazi or Vichy officials for their life-saving activities. Vladimir Vochoc was put under house arrest pending deportation. Consul General Gilberto Bosques of Mexico was arrested and detained in Germany for more than a year for helping refugees in France.
Numerous rescue and relief agencies volunteered from around Europe and the world to help the endangered Jewish refugees, internees trapped in the camps or in hiding in danger of deportation. These organizations included the American Friends’ Service Committee (Quakers), from the USA, the Unitarian Service Committee, headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, the Mennonite Committee, from the USA, the American Federation of Labor, the Emergency Rescue Committee of New York City, the American Red Cross, and the YMCA, under Donald Lowrie, Tracy Strong and Père Arnou.
[Encyclopedia Judaica. 16 vols. (Jerusalem: Keter, 1971-1972), Vol. 7, pp. 32-36. Gutman, Yisrael (Ed.). Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1990). Marrus, Michael, R., and Robert O. Paxton. Vichy France and the Jews. (New York: Basic Books, 1981). Rayski, Adam. The Choice of Jews Under Vichy, Between Submission and Resistance. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press and US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, 2005). Ryan, Donna F. The Holocaust and the Jews of Marseille: The Enforcement of Anti-Semitic Policies in Vichy France. (Urbana, IL: The University of Illinois Press, 1996).]
Rescue and Survival in France
Percentage of Jews in France who survived: 75-76%
This was the highest survival percentage of any country in Western Europe.
Number of Jews who escaped from France to Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, 1940-1942: 50,000-60,000
Number of Jews who emigrated from France legally before it was banned in November 1942: 10,000+
Number of Jews who survived in France, June 1940-August 1944: approximately 275,000
100,000-150,000 survived in open or in hiding
30,000 in Paris
20,000-30,000 children placed in hiding
50,000 in Italian Zone
15,000 in Marseilles
Number of rescuers in France recognized by Yad Vashem: 2,833
Number of families and individuals recognized by Yad Vashem: 1,786
Many thousands of others not recognized or documented.
Rescue and Relief Organizations
Number of rescue organizations operating in France that provided aid and relief or saved Jews: Approximately 90+
In Southern France, the Nîmes Committee/Camps Committee (Comité des Camps) coordinated relief and rescue operations. It was comprised of 25 groups, six of which were Jewish.
Number of international organizations that provided aid and relief or saved Jews: 12
Number of American rescue organizations operating in France involved in rescue and relief of Jews: Approximately 15
Number of religious organizations that provided aid and relief or saved Jews: 15
Number of Jewish relief or rescue organizations: 79+
“Every Jew who survived in France during 1942 to 1944 owed his or her life to some French man or woman who helped, or at least kept a secret.”
- Michael Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews
Jewish population in France
1933
Jewish population in France 1933: approximately 240,000
0.57% of total population
1939
Jewish population in France 1939: approximately 300,000 – 330,000
Total French population: 41,600,000
Jewish refugees from Nazi occupied territories of Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia: approximately 70,000
Total immigrants in France: 3,000,000
800,000 Italians
400,000 Poles
300,000 Spanish Republican soldiers
300,000 Balkan refugees
80,000 Armenian refugees
1940
Total French population 1940: 43 million
Jews were less than 1 percent of the population of France
Jewish population in France, 1940: 350,000 (150,000 had been French for generations, 70,000 were naturalized French citizens)
Number of French-born Jews in France 1940: 150,000
Foreign Jews residing in France: 150,000
Percent of foreign Jews residing in France: 50%
0.35%
6% of the total foreigners
Number of Jews who fled to France for refuge: 75,000
50,000 from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland
25,000 from Belgium and Holland
After June 1940
North - occupied zone: 150,000+
Paris: 120,000 – 150,000
South/Vichy - unoccupied zone: 200,000+
145,000 French-born Jews
65,000 Jews of diverse origin:
20,000+ East European Jews
30,000+ refugees from Germany, Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Luxembourg, Alsace
Marseilles total population 1939: 650,000
In 1940 after German invasion: 841,000 (190,000 refugees-displaced persons)
Jews in Marseilles: 15,000+; Bouches-du-Rhone region, 1941: 18,000-25,000+
25-30% not French citizens
8,000 foreign Jews, including 4,541 men, 2,986 women, 473 children
Aix-en-Provence: 2,100 Jews
Between 1936 and May 1939, 70,000 Spanish refugees came to the Bouches –du-Rhone
Italian zone of occupation, 1942 through September: 30,000+
Number of Jews interned in unoccupied zone as of June 1940: 32,000
Fact Sheet – France
From the 1870s until June 1940, France was a Republic. It was instituted by the National assembly. It was called the Third Republic. It was governed by a set of Constitutional laws.
France surrendered to the German Army in June 1940. After the Armistice was signed, the National Assembly voted to suspend Constitutional laws.
Marshall Philippe Pétain, a hero of the French Army in World War I, was appointed Head of State and set up in the town of Vichy in Southern France.
Under the Armistice agreement, France was divided into two areas. The Occupied Zone in the North included Paris and the entire Atlantic and Channel coasts. This area comprised three firths of France. It was occupied by the German Army (Wehrmacht).
The Southern Zone (unoccupied zone) bordered on Spain, the Mediterranean coast, Italy and Switzerland. The largest city in this zone was Marseilles, located on the Mediterranean Sea.
Unlike the other Nazi occupied countries of Western Europe (e.g., Belgium, Holland, Denmark), France maintained a civil government and a police force. It maintained a nominal degree of autonomy and authority.
The Germans required and received support from the Vichy government to accomplish their occupation goals.
The arrest and deportation of thousands of Jews could not have been accomplished without the support of the Vichy government.
In August 1942, Vichy became the only European country (except Bulgaria) to willingly hand over Jews from an area in which they maintained independent control.
How did the 170,000 Jews survive in France?
30,000 lived openly or in semi-hiding in Paris.
20,000-30,000 mostly children survived with the help of Jewish rescue groups.
100,000+ Jews survived in hiding in France with the organized and independent help of the French people.
Number of Jews helped by the Hebrew Immigration and Aid Society (HIAS) with the financial aid of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee: Approximately 24,000 from June 1940-March 1943
Number of people helped by the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC): Approximately 2,500
Number of refugees helped by Mexican Ambassador Gilberto Bosques: Approximately 30,000-40,000 (mostly Spanish Republican soldiers)
Number of refugees helped by Portuguese Consul General in Bordeaux: thousands
Number of visas issued by US consulate in Marseilles through summer 1941: approximately 8,500
Number of people who were helped by the Unitarian Service Committee (USC):
Cost to immigrate to the United States: US $500
Papers needed to emigrate (escape) from France:
traveling paper or national passport
French exit visa
travel pass
transit visa from Portugal
transit visa from Spain
registration of the dossier at the prefecture of the Department of the Bouches-du-Rhône, or at the military service department of the Ministry of Colonies
letter from the French prefecture authorizing the steamship company to deliver a space on the emigrant’s boat
entry (destination) visa
Jewish Survival in the Holocaust
“If you save the life of one person, it is as if you saved the world entire.”
- Talmud
Estimated number of Jews in Europe as of 1933: 9,500,000.[1] This represented 1.7% of the total population of Europe.
Number of Jews in Europe as of September 1939: 9,067,800-9,797,000 (rounded).[2]
Estimated number of Jews who survived the war in Europe (not including neutral European countries): 3,207,800-4,201,000 (rounded).[3]
Jews who resided in neutral European countries as of 1933: 435,700-442,700.[4] Proportion of Jews in Europe who lived in neutral countries as of 1933: 4.6-4.7%
Estimated percent of Jews who survived the war in Europe (not including neutral European countries): 35-43%.[5]
Estimated number of Jews who survived in Europe, including neutral countries: 3,643,500-4,643,700.[6]
Estimated number of Jews who survived in Nazi occupied zones: 1-2 million.[7]
Number of Jews who were able to successfully emigrate from Europe through Lisbon, Portugal, Milan, Italy, Marseilles, France, Hamburg, Germany: 810,000.[8]
Estimated number of people who helped Jews throughout Europe: 500,000-1,000,000.[9] The number of Poles who aided Jews is estimated to be between 160,000-300,000, or 1-2.5% of the population of Poland.[10] Each rescue of a Jew often involved more than just one individual. Often, whole families would hide and shelter a Jew. Sometimes, an entire village would participate in hiding a number of Jews. Some Jewish refugees would travel from country to country, where they were helped by various rescue networks and individuals. In some cases, a Jew on the run could be aided by as many as 25 individuals.
Estimated number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust: 5,100,000[11] (rounded)-5,820,960[12].
Number of people who rescued or aided Jews who were executed: unknown. Number compiled by the Main Commission for Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland: 872 Poles. Several hundred more were killed in mass executions.[13]
Number of Jews who aided or rescued fellow Jews: Unknown. There were thousands of Jewish rescuers and hundreds of rescue and relief organizations throughout Europe and the Free World.[14]
Number of persons honored as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem as of January 2017: 26,513 (see chart below).
Jews of France – 78% (approximately 272,680 survived, 77,320 lost)[15] Among the survivors are Jewish refugees from Germany, Austria, Belgium and other European Countries. Pre-deportation Jewish population was 350,000. As of 2017, 3,995 French people have been honored for rescuing Jews.[16]
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[1] USHMM.org
[2] Hilberg, 1985, pp. 1201-1220; Bauer & Rozett, in Gutman, 1990, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, s.v. “Estimated Losses in the Holocaust,” pp. 1799
[3] Bauer & Rozett, in Gutman, 1990, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, s.v. “Estimated Losses in the Holocaust,” pp. 1799; Benz, in Laqueur, 2001, The Holocaust Encyclopedia, s.v. “Death Toll,” pp. 137-145; Hilberg, 1985;
[4] Bauer & Rozett, in Gutman, 1990, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, s.v. “Estimated Losses in the Holocaust,” pp. 1799; Benz, in Laqueur, 2001, The Holocaust Encyclopedia, s.v. “Death Toll,” pp. 137-145; Hilberg, 1985; USHMM.org.
[5] Bauer & Rozett, in Gutman, 1990, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, s.v. “Estimated Losses in the Holocaust,” pp. 1799; Benz, in Laqueur, 2001, The Holocaust Encyclopedia, s.v. “Death Toll,” pp. 137-145.
[6] This figure was arrived at by adding the estimated number of survivors by country and Jews who were present in neutral countries in 1933. This presumes survival of Jews who were in neutral countries, e.g., that they did not return to Nazi-occupied territory. Many left Europe from neutral countries to other parts of the world, including the United States, Canada, South America, China, Australia, etc.
[7] Bauer & Rozett, in Gutman, 1990, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, s.v. “Estimated Losses in the Holocaust,” pp. 1799-1802
[8] Bauer, 1974; Bauer, 1981; Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Annual Reports, 1933-1945, “Aiding Jews Overseas.”
[9] Opinion cited, official at Yad Vashem.
[10] Prekerowa in Gutman, 1990, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, s.v., “Aid to Jews by Poles,” pp. 9-12.
[11] Hilberg, 1985
[12] Robinson, 1972
[13] Prekerowa in Gutman, 1990, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, s.v., “Aid to Jews by Poles,” pp. 9-12.
[14] American Jewish Committee (AJC) Yearbooks, 1933-1947; American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Aiding Jews Overseas: Reports of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1939-1942; American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, The Rescue of Stricken Jews in a World at War, December 1943; Bauer, 1981.
[15] Bauer & Rozett, in Gutman, 1990, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, s.v. “Estimated Losses in the Holocaust,” pp. 1799-1800; Benz, in Laqueur, 2001, The Holocaust Encyclopedia, s.v. “Death Toll,” p. 145, states 76,000 were lost; Hilberg, 1985, p. 1221; Marrus, 1981; Ryan, 2003; Weinberg, in Laqueur, 2001, The Holocaust Encyclopedia, s.v. “France,” p. 219.
[16] Lazare, 2003, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous among the Nations: France; Marrus, 1981.
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Concentration Camps in France
At the end of September 1940, immediately after the French surrender, there were 31 concentration camps in the French zone. This total was compiled and reported by the Kundt Commission, which was created by Article 19 of the armistice. This total includes smaller, temporary camps. The major camps were:
Rivesaltes (Pyrenees-Orientales) – 6,000 internees at the end of 1941.
Le Vernet (Ariège)
Rieucros (Lozère) – Women’s camp.
Argelés (Pyrenees-Orientales) – 15,000 population at the end of 1940, mostly Spanish refugees.
Les Milles (Aix-en-Provence) – This was a transit center for refugees expecting to obtain papers to leave France. It was located near Marseilles. Many of the diplomats went to Les Milles to have refugees released.
Gurs (Basses-Pyrenees) – Received thousands of Jewish deportees from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia.
Noé (Haute-Garonne) – Camp for sick and elderly.
Récébédou (Toulouse)
Refugees were interned in 10 hospitals and 16 prisons in the unoccupied zone.
In the occupied zone, there were 15 camps. During 1941, the Jews in the north were deported to these three principle camps:
Beaune-la-Rolande (Loiret) – Originally built as a camp to hold Canadian troops, then French prisoners of war, after 1941 it became a center for Parisian Jews.
Pithiviers (Loiret) – Established to intern French prisoners of war, after May 1941 it was used to hold French and foreign Jews.
Drancy (Paris) – Opened in August 1941 in a suburb of Paris. Eventually, most of the Jews deported to Auschwitz would first be sent to Drancy.
All of the camps were administered by French authorities.
Chapter 6: Gurs, from Donald A. Lowrie, The Hunted Children (1963):
After I had my official Vichy permissions I began my camp visits with Gurs. During our first weeks in Pau after the exodus I had heard dreadful rumors about this camp. Now I would see for myself. After twenty miles on the bumpy little train southwest from Pau to Oloron, the nearest railway station, I was lucky to find a charcoal-burning taxi to take me the six miles by country road and up the hill to the camp entrance.
In my service to war prisoners in Siberia in 1916 I had visited many camps, and this one looked quite familiar from the outside: two eight-foot barbed wire fences, fifteen feet apart, with armed guards patrolling between the rows of wire. Atop the fence at a dozen places were weather-beaten wooden towers where watchmen were stationed at night. (p. 61) The road side of the barbed-wire barrier stretched more than a mile along the roadway to Oloron. Outside, the nearest building to the camp was a dirty little cafe in a shack half a mile away.
Gurs was notorious long before this November day in 1940. The camp had been hastily constructed on a bare plateau south of Pau to harbor refugees streaming over the passes of the Pyrenees after the rout of the republican forces in the Spanish civil war in the spring of 1938. Built and originally managed by the French army, it was only later transferred to the charge of the Securite Nationale, the national police.
To the soldier at the gate ( two buttons missing on his soiled horizon-blue uniform) I said that I wished to see the commandant. He stepped inside the gate and conferred with another guard, then motioned me to enter. The second soldier, rifle on shoulder, marched with me up the long central allee of the camp, delivering me at the shedlike office where some sort of secretary said the commandant would see me shortly, and would I wait outside? I sat on a bench beside the door and waited. Leaning against the wall beside me was a guard's bicycle, locked with a pair of handcuffs. Watching groups of ragged men slogging about in the muddy road, I could survey the camp.
A vast expanse of swampy plain in the shadow of the snowy Pyrenees, row after row of low wooden barracks sitting in a sea of mud. The soil was pure clay that the autumn rains had turned into a glutinous mass, almost impassable, except for the central roads and some narrow paths made of gravel from the river valley below. Built of uncured lumber, the windowless structures had never known paint, and the shrinkage of raw boards had left cracks which were stuffed with paper to keep out the wind. The trap doors in the roof were for ventilation, but they had to be closed whenever it rained, and then the only light was what filtered in from the single door at each end of the building.
The small city of eighteen thousand which was the camp (p. 63) of Gurs was divided into ilots (sections) with a dozen barracks in each. Double rows of eight-foot barbed-wire fence separated the sections. No passage from ilot to ilot was allowed without permission from the commandant's office, so that those behind wire fences closely surrounding the buildings in each ilot were condemned to almost complete immobility. Guarded gates closed either end of the median "street." Even if outside the camp there was any place of refuge from the Vichy police, escape from here would be almost impossible.
A sea of mud: it had rained for days and the camp's brown clay soil had become a morass; it took tremendous effort to move any distance. If a man fell down, he was almost like an insect caught on flypaper-without someone to help, he could not get up. This was particularly painful for the thousands of old folk. The gravel paths leading to each barrack were negotiable, but all the surrounding earth was so sticky that for days on end refugees were confined to the dark and humid interior of the hutments. Another unintentional cruelty resulted from the fact that the crude shacks of latrines were set atop five steep and unrailed steps, risky enough for a sound-bodied man and especially treacherous for the hundreds of old people. The mud, the everlasting rain, the lack of beds and bedding, the scarce and insufficient camp fare-all helped to create dreariness and desolation.
The Spanish refugees, first inhabitants of Gurs, by now had little left in the way of clothing. Two years of camp fare had left them all as thin as sticks-poor legs and ankles so bony it hurt to look at them. The women were pitiful in their attempts to appear well dressed, most of them wearing galoshes or wooden sabots instead of shoes. Some of the very chic wore shiny rubber boots-the mud did not splash their stockings, if they had any. How some of them managed to procure make-up in this place of desolation was a mystery, perhaps explained by a remark I heard later about "camp-made prostitutes."
[…]
A million others, all over Europe, were in camps more or less resembling Gurs, although each had its own individuality.
[Lowrie, pp. 60-73]
Chapter 7: A Million Others, from Donald A. Lowrie, The Hunted Children (1963):
Jules had heard that the camps were enclosed by barbed wire, but save for border fortifications he had noted during World War I, he had never seen anything like Vernet. Two eight-foot wire fences, fifteen feet apart, and between them an entanglement of barbed wire which no one could dream of (p. 80) passing without a cutter. Armed guards were patrolling outside, and Levy noted that all the guards inside carried revolvers. After the usual search of his pockets, he was assured that their contents, including his identity papers, would be held for him in the office, and while his Arab traveling companion went off to one section of the camp, Jules was put into the "political" area.
When he got back to Marseilles he told me the story: "My first impression was shock and almost horror as I faced the others there. How could men be held in such conditions? They looked like walking corpses. I knew food was scarce in France, but we were not yet starving. In my ordinary decent street clothes, I felt like a show-window mannequin: these men were wearing what was left of the clothes they were arrested in, two or three years before. Someone showed me a place on the sleeping bench where I could crowd myself in. Some of the men had blankets, but I found the smelly barrack so hot I thought I wouldn't need one: before morning I felt differently. Someone also gave me a large sardine can that was my sole eating equipment for days, until I could find another internee who sold me a spoon. We ate standing: there were no tables, and the only place to sit was the edge of the lower tier of bunks. And there was only cold water to rinse out our tin cans after we had eaten. I met one young student there who had a rough tabouret. He said it had saved his reason. He could take the stool and go into the farthest corner of the barbed-wire enclosure, turn his back to the crowd, ,and sit there and read. Someone had given him a Bible, and in four months he had read it from cover to cover.
"After a few days I got used to the smell, and learned to leap to 'attention' every time the adjutant came into the barrack. These hutments had been built in summer, of unseasoned boards, and the weather howled through every crack. But the cold was not as bad as the bedbugs. Although you could buy some sort of insecticide at the canteen, it seemed impossible to keep the bunks clean. At the canteen you could (p. 81) also buy writing paper and candy. One political from Lyon complained that he could not buy butter or bacon, and couldn't believe me when I said we hadn't seen these in Marseilles in months.
[Lowrie, pp. 79-81]
Donald Lowrie Account
The demarcation line bounded a territory that was the last refuge of some two hundred thousand people, French or alien, either having no place to which they might return or not daring to go back under Nazi occupation. France had been the last place of refuge for the political liberals and the Jews of all Europe. With more than half of France in the hands of the Nazis they had been fleeing, the other part became the last resort of these harried and helpless refugees.
For all of them Vichy held the only possible hope. Bumbling and makeshift as it was, it was still the government of France, and under a dictatorship it held the authority of life or death for “dirty foreigners.” As months dragged on, the regime emphasized ever more strongly the distinction between French and aliens. Of the French, only suspected de Gaullists lived under such increasing pressure, but all foreigners had to place themselves under police surveillance. In an effort to get at citizens it disliked, Vichy ordered the reconsideration of all recent cases of naturalization, “to begin with the list of persons denounced as undesirable.” If, after this procedure, one’s passport was withdrawn—and a man without a passport was as helpless as an animal—one might appeal to a specially decreed commission, but the implication was that it would be uphill going to procure a valid travel document even for movement within the unoccupied Zone. Even with his papers in order, anyone not a French citizen could not leave the village where he resided without a special permit signed by the prefect (governor) of the province, and a request for this permit often had to be referred to Vichy. This procedure guaranteed a delay of three to six weeks, by which time the reason for the journey had probably ceased to exist.
And beyond the limitations imposed on all foreigners were the special restrictions against the Jews, eventually including even those born in France and “more French than Napoleon.” Replying to the rising protests of justice-loving men, French or otherwise, against this anti-Semitic legislation, the Vichy government issued its phenomenal statement of October 17 (1940), a sort of preface to Nazism in France:
“The texts already adopted by the Council of Ministers to regulate the situation of French Jews, or Jews resident in France, will shortly appear in the ‘Journal Officiel.’
“In its task of national reconstruction the government has had, from the very first, to study the problem of Jews and of certain other foreigners who, abusing our hospitality, have contributed not a little to our defeat. … With certain quite honorable exceptions … the dominating influence of the Jews has made itself everywhere felt, especially in public services, leading finally to decomposition. All observers agree in affirming the evil effect of their activity in recent years, when they have had a preponderant influence in our affairs. These are the facts which direct the government’s action in its pathetic task of French restoration.
“In its absolute serenity, the government has refused to undertake reprisals: it respects the person and the property of Jews: merely prevents them from assuming certain social functions, of authority, of management, of the formation of intelligence. Experience has proved to the government, as to all impartial minds, that Jews in these functions have exercised an individualistic tendency which has gone almost to anarchy. Our disaster imposes on us the task of regrouping French forces whose characteristics have been fixed by long heredity. This is not a matter of mass vengeance, but of indispensable security.
“The government may absolve from certain general restrictions prescribed in the national interest of France those Jews who deserve well of the fatherland, and this reservation proves in what a humane spirit it has set itself to regulate a problem whose universal character is demonstrated by our present disaster.”
Most Jews could still not believe it, but for the wiser among them this unctuous declaration meant only one thing: escape from France as speedily as possible. Before long, helping people to escape from France was to be a principal part of my business.
Source: Lowrie, Donald A. The Hunted Children. New York: W. W. Norton, 1963.
Monsignor Saliège●, the Archbishop of Toulouse
Monsignor Saliège, the Archbishop of Toulouse, was the first high-ranking clergyman to protest publicly against the inhuman treatment of the Jews by the Vichy regime. On November 23, 1941, he sent a letter of protest on that subject, at a time when the entire Catholic hierarchy was silent. Hearing about the deportation of Jews from the camps in the south of France to the Drancy transit camp in August 1942, he composed a pastoral letter that was read from the pulpit in all the churches of his diocese on Sunday August 23, 1942: “That children, women, and men, fathers and mothers, are treated like a vile herd, that members of a family are separated from one another and sent to an unknown destination, it was reserved for our time to see that sad sight. Why does the right of asylum no longer exist in our churches? Why are we defeated? ... Jewish men are men. Jewish women are women. Not every act is permitted against them. ... They are part of the human race. They are our brothers like so many other people.” Overnight, the document became a manifesto; hundreds of thousands of copies were made and were circulated by members of the Resistance throughout France. Historians consider Saliège’s protest vastly influential in the abrupt turnabout in French public opinion at that time, in which support for the Vichy regime plummeted. Henceforth, more of the French people were prepared to oppose the anti-Jewish actions of the Vichy gendarmes and of the occupation authorities.
Saliège also instructed the clergymen and nuns in his archdiocese to hide Jews, particularly children.
Acknoweldgements
This document is dedicated to the following individuals, who have supported the Institute for the Study of Rescue and Altruism in the Holocaust, and the Visas for Life Project. Many of them are the direct descendants of rescuers of the Holocaust. They have sustained us with their support and encouragement over these many years.
Mary Mochary
Amy Fiske
Per Anger
Bosques Family
Laura Bosques
Gilberto Bosques Tistler
Erendira Bosques
Theresa Bosques
Bingham Family
William T. Endicott
Abbie Bingham Endicott
William Bingham, Esq.
Kim Bingham
David Bingham
De Sousa Mendes Family
John Paul Abranches
Sheila Abranches
Agnes Hirschi
Louise Von Dardel
Steinhardt Family
Peter Rosenblatt
Laurene Sherlock
Stula Family
Peter Wolff
Paul Wolff
Benjamin Zukor
American Jewish Committee
David Harris
Simon Wiesenthal Center
Rabbi Marvin Heir
Rabbi Abraham Cooper
Liebe Geft
World Jewish Congress
Dr. Israel Singer