On November 8th, 1942, British and American forces landed in North Africa. Three days later, just as it grew light, the Wehrmacht, fearing an allied landing on France’s Mediterranean coast, crossed the demarcation line that had previously separated the German-held north from the Vichy south and occupied the whole country. From that moment on, no one was safe: not the Resistance, whose numbers were increasing all the time and who had found security of a kind in the previously unoccupied zone; not ordinary people suspected of anti-German and anti-Vichy sentiments; and certainly not the Jews.
From now until the liberation of France in the summer of 1944, some 19 months later, villages, hamlets, towns, remote country areas everywhere were subject to rafles, rounds up, whether of hostages to shoot in reprisal for attacks on German soldiers, or of Jews, to be deported to the death camps in Poland. One Day in France, like a Greek tragedy, is the account of what happened on a single day in the spring of 1944, April 6th, on one small plateau in the Corrèze in central France, when a group of SS soldiers with their death's head insignia descended on the area. This is history viewed through a magnifying glass, using one forgotten event in one place to tell the story of what the French call les années noires, the dark and terrifying years of German occupation and French collaboration.
Jean-Marie Borzeix is a distinguished and successful cultural journalist and editor, and the former director of France’s prestigious public radio channel, France-Culture. In 2001, he found himself travelling repeatedly between Paris and the small market town of Bougeat, which lies some 200 kilometres southwest of Clermont-Ferrand, just north of Brive, in order to visit his father, who was ill. Borzeix himself is a native of the area, having been born in Bougeat in the summer of 1941. It was just near here, in the little village of L’Echamiel, that the tragic events which he describes on Holy Thursday took place.
Borzeix’s tale follows three separate strands, each entwined with the other, one story feeding into another, but all with a slightly different background. What started as a journalist’s simple curiosity, the desire to discover more about the war in the Corrèze, spread bit by bit as he learnt more, and saw how hard it was to unearth facts long left buried. His first thought was to seek out and interview the survivors and their descendants: interviewing, as he once said, was in his journalist blood. Soon, however, he found himself faced with great gaps in knowledge and memory, holes in the story that could only be plugged through deeper archival research. He turned to the excellent departmental and national libraries of which France is justly proud. But by now he had also been bitten by another bug, something very familiar to the French, a fascination with the process of memory itself, what is recalled and how, and what is lost and why, and this too he decided to weave into the narrative of his book.
By the spring of 1944, when the story at the heart of One Day in France begins, plans were already being finalised for the invasion and liberation of France, in which the Resistance and the Maquis, hiding out in the mountainous areas of central and southern France, intended to play a major role. Across the Limousin and the Haute-Loire, for many miles all around Bugeat and L’Echameil, there were some 14 different groups of maquisards, gathered under three overarching umbrellas: that of the Gaullist Armée Secrète, that of the Mouvements Unis de la Résistance, and that of the fighting arm of the communist Francs-Tirreurs et Partisans Français. Many of these young maquisards were local boys, evading the draft of the Service du Travail Obligatoire, the STO, under which young Frenchmen were despatched to Germany to help the war industry. They spent their nights high in the mountains, in hiding, and were provisioned by their families in the villages and hamlets below, or by men and women known as the “legals”, who pursued ordinary lives, with ordinary occupations on the surface but who at the same time provided secret help to the underground. As the spring of 1944 advanced, so the attacks by the maquis on the Germans multiplied. Convoys were ambushed, trains derailed, depots bombed, soldiers killed.
The events that took place on that Holy Thursday in 1944 were a direct consequence of one such maquisard attack, in which a number of German officers had been ambushed. Their comrades were after revenge. Though less barbaric that the better-known reprisals that took place in the nearby town of Tulle soon after, when 99 men and boys were hanged from lamp-posts, trees and balconies as punishment for a successful maquis assault, the apparently random, calm, almost mechanical selection and execution of four innocent men among the inhabitants of L’Echameil has the same chilling mercilessness. In Tulle, the German troops drank and laughed while the bodies swung in the air; in L’Echameil, the Wehrmacht soldiers left behind cheerfully set about making preparations for an Easter feast. Uncovering and describing the identity of the local men chosen as victims, the negotiations preceding their execution and the execution itself, forms the first strand of Borzeix’s narrative.
The second concerns a Jewish violinist, father of two young daughters and about to become a father for the third time. Chaim Rozent’s capture and subsequent killing belongs not to the need to punish hostages but to the Germans’ round up of the Jews. Once again, failing to find enough information through his interviews, Borzeix turned to the archives. These yielded remarkable material.
When the Germans invaded France in May 1940, and cut the country in two, they were not yet planning to make it Judenfrei, free of Jews, for that still lay in the future. Rather, what they had in mind was to use the zone ruled over – at least nominally – by Maréchal Pétain and his Vichy government as a reception centre for all those unwanted Jews who had resided until then in the north. Those that fled south with the great exodus of May and June 1940, when some six million terrified people took to the roads in cars, milk floats, hearses, on bicycles and horseback, on their feet, dragging behind them cases, small children, even animals, were not to be allowed back across the demarcation line. They settled, in various degree of safety, across the Vichy zone, some of them in and around L’Echameil and Bugeat.
By the spring of 1944, however, things had moved on. Vichy’s anti-Semitism very nearly matched that of the German occupiers and Pétain and his head of government, Pierre Laval, had been quick to anticipate German wishes. Between October 8th, 1940 and September 16th, 1941, Vichy pushed through 26 laws, 24 decrees, six by-laws and one regulation on the Jews, effectively disenfranchising them and banning them from a wide number of professions and occupations. The 150,000 or so foreign Jews among them, who had settled in France during the more welcoming 1920s and 1930s, when foreign workers were needed to make up for the one and a half million Frenchmen who had died in the first world war, had quickly been rounded up and put into internment camps. From here, all through 1942 and 1943, they had been handed over to the Germans and deported from the station of Drancy, on the outskirts of Paris, to the extermination camp of Auschwitz. In exchange, Pétain and Laval had asked for, and briefly obtained, an agreement that, for the moment at least, French Jews would be safe.
That deal, however, had not lasted long. Once most of the foreign Jews had been taken, the Germans turned their eyes towards the French ones. The trains leaving Drancy now contained not only Polish, Russian, German, Lithuanian and Italian Jews, but French families, long assimilated into French life, many believing themselves to be essentially French, and not Jewish at all. In L’Echameil as in other hamlets and towns across the Haute Loire and the Corrèze, the hunt was now on for all remaining Jews, whether French or foreign. That those who were French believed that they were safe made it all the easier for the Germans to track them down. Though Rozent and his family were originally Polish, having come to France only in 1940, they had lived in the area for several years and they, too, had believed themselves secure. Their French neighbours were friends; they felt themselves protected. What happened to Chaim and his family on April 6th, and to 10 other local Jews, arrested on the same day, was happening every day all over France, with the same tragic consequences.
By the time France was liberated, some 75,000 Jews had been deported, the majority of them foreign. Not many more than 2,500 came home. The last train to leave Drancy for Auschwitz, with over 300 children on board, did not depart until July 31th, 1944, by which time De Gaulle’s forces were already advancing on Paris. That some 300,000 Jews survived the Holocaust in France – which made it one of the highest survival rates in Europe – says much about the courage and generous spiritedness of the inhabitants of places like L’Echameil and Bugeat. Though neither of those places ever acquired the renown of the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, or Dieulefit, where local inhabitants consciously set out to save Jews, it is heartening to read about the selfless way in which many perfectly ordinary French men and women behaved. Had others behaved so imaginatively, with so little regard to their own well-being, the picture would have been better still.
One Day in France’s third strand touches on another, endlessly fascinating, aspect of France and its years of occupation. It is about memory. No European country has been as interested as France in the subject of memory and history, how it is perceived, understood, recorded, arranged, rearranged and transmitted. This obsession with memory as a fluid, living, endlessly changing phenomenon, something in constant evolution, dates back to 1929, when Marc Bloch and Lucien Lebvre founded the Annales school. In what have been described as the “memory wars”, French historians, “militants of memory”, have picked over the past, questioning, evaluating, reshaping its contours. There are said today to be some 100,000 “lieux de mémoire”, sites of remembrance, in France, and these are not only actual places, monuments and sites, but people and even ideas. While researching his book, Borzeix became engrossed by the part played by memory in his story, the way that some of his witnesses remembered some things, others quite different ones, others again, nothing at all.
France has had trouble coming to term with its années noires. The stain left by collaboration has if anything spread, as more and more people have been forced to acknowledge what took place. For many years – decades – encouraged by De Gaulle’s determination to put the past behind and reconstruct a strong and independent France, it was easier to lay the blame on a small number of rotten apples. It was not until Marcel Ophuls’s remarkable film, Le Chagrin et la Pitié, in 1969, and Robert Paxton’s Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, which appeared in 1972, that France’s complicity in the murder of the Jews was seriously debated, and not until the 1980s and 1990s that some of the most notorious French collaborators – Klaus Barbie, René Bousquet, Maurice Papon – were finally brought to trial.
One result of the long delay in facing up to wartime crimes has been to obscure the events of those years, to cover them with a film of amnesia, to make them seem even more fluid and elusive; and, in some cases, to make the very mention of them toxic. During the long quest for the identity of the man who had betrayed Jean Moulin to the Gestapo, the names of two heroes of the Resistance, Lucie and Raymond Aubrac, were mentioned. They had been blameless, but for some years this now elderly couple was subject to hurtful accusations.
What Borzeix discovered among some of those he interviewed was not just forgetfulness, but what he calls a “refoulement collectif”, a willful collective pushing back, rejecting, repression of the memory of those times. Seeking clarity and facts, he was driven ever deeper into the archives, where his patient sleuthing uncovered many unexpected things. His aim, he said, was not to find culprits, the names of those who may have given the Jews away, but to “retrieve the dead from the forgetting” into which they had been cast.
In the late 1940s, the playwright and author Charlotte Delbo, who was one of the very few French survivors of Auschwitz, sat down and wrote about her experiences. Then she put her account to one side, and left it there, unlooked at, for 20 years. She wanted to be certain that her words stood the test of time, and really did convey what it had actually felt like to be in a death camp. By making her prose absolutely plain, completely transparent, with no embellishment, no adjectives, she hoped that nothing would come between the reader and his understanding. Auschwitz and After, published finally in the 1970s, is as immediate and haunting a portrait of the holocaust as the works of Primo Levi.
When writing One Day in France, Borzeix reached the same decision. In order to give back life and dignity to the men and women whose sad stories he tells, he set out to write as simply and clearly as he could, his words as “depouillées” as shorn, bald, bare as he could make them, as he told a reporter. As with Delbo and Levi, the short, stark sentences, and the absence of any trace of floweriness, lend the narrative great strength.
One Day in France: Tragedy and Betrayal in an Occupied Village by Jean-Marie Borzeix, translated by Gay McAuley, with a foreword by Caroline Moorehead, is published by IB Tauris, £18.99
