French President Francois Mitterrand, in a book of interviews with Nobel laureate Eile Wiesel published here this week, staunchly defended his friendship with a Frenchman charged with being a Nazi collaborator.
The book, “Memoir for Two Voices,” the record of a series of conversations between Mitterrand and Wiesel that were held between 1987 and 1994, is mainly a recollection of the French president’s childhood, his internment in German prisoner-of-war camp and an assessment of his career.
But it also touches upon the controversial friendship Mitterrand had with Rene Bousquet, the collaborationist Vichy regime’s police chief between 1942 and 1944.
Bousquet, the man responsible for the infamous Velodrome d’Hiver roundup of Jews on July 16, 1942, had been charged with crimes against humanity for his wartime actions, which led to the deportations of thousands of Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
But before Bousquet could stand trial, he was killed in his home by a gunman in June 1993 at the age of 82.
Mitterrand’s friendship with Bousquet was detailed in “A French Youth: Francois Mitterrand 1934-1947,” a biography of the French president by journalist Pierre Pean that sent shockwaves through the general public when it was published last year.
Wiesel, in one conversation with Mitterrand, said he was “auguished and troubled” by the revelations contained in Pean’s book.
“I’m answering you because it is you. Otherwise, I have no accounts to give to any of those self-styled judges,” Mitterrand replied.
As in other sections of the book dealing with his actions during the wartime years, Mitterrand was far from apologetic about his friendship with Bousquet.
He denied knowing Bousquet during the war, and claimed that he broke off the relationship in 1986, after Bousquet’s past became widely known.
During the war, Mitterrand, a sergeant in the French army, was captured and held as a prisoner of war by German troops.
After he escaped from captivity in 1941, he immediately went Vichy, where he served as a high-ranking official in the Veterans Affairs Ministry of the collaborationist regime. He wrote intelligence reports on the enemies of the regime, namely, the communists and Gaullists.
Although he has insisted that he was never an anti-Semite, Mitterrand apparently had no concerns at the time about the Vichy laws against Jews and foreigners.
By mid-1943, Mitterrand, like many high-ranking members of the Vichy administration, began to question the outcome of the war and initiated contacts with the underground Resistance.
Toward the end of 1943, Mitterrand made a secret visit to London, returned to France and became a prominent leader of the Resistance.
During his captivity in Germany, Mitterrand told Wiesel, he had little information about what was happening in France. But he said that upon returning to France, the sight of Jews wearing yellow stars and the growing awareness of Vichy’s anti-Semitic laws eventually “moved (him) away from a system accepting such a crime,” a system he ultimately “fought against.”
Mitterrand maintains in the book that in 1943, two years after the deportations of Jews from France began, he still had not heard of Auschwitz.
“This word was unheard of,” he told Wiesel, who is a Holocaust survivor and former Auschwitz internee. “I knew there were camps, but I did not know about the systematic destruction. I couldn’t imagine the reality of Auschwitz.”
In 1993, in statement long called for by French Jews and World War II Resistance fighters, Mitterrand denounced the “extermination of the Jews of France during the Vichy regime,” saying that “justice starts with remembrance against the forces of forgetfulness.”
“Memoir for Two Voices” was published about a month before Mitterrand will end his unprecedented 14-year term as French president.
Mitterrand, who is 78 and suffering from prostate cancer, will step down after a successor is chosen in elections to be held later this month.
Asked by Wiesel what he thought were his greatest accomplishments, Mitterrand cited his successful efforts to end the death penalty in France, the integration of his country into the European Union and his “defense of the oppressed people of the Third World.”
When Wiesel asked him to recall his greatest moment of happiness, Mitterrand chose the day in May 1991 when he was elected France’s first Socialist president.
The book received huge advance publicity in 1993, when Wiesel’s publisher launched a lawsuit against the publisher of “Verbatim,” a book by Mitterrand’s former chief aide, Jacques Attali, who sat in on the Wiesel-Mitterrand interviews.
In the lawsuit, Wiesel’s publisher charged that Attali had made extensive use of portions of those interviews. But a Paris court ruled against the plaintiff, saying Attali’s publisher had not committed plagiarism.
When the book reached publication this week, Wiesel described the collection of interviews as “the president’s book, more than mine.”
Asked by one French publication whether he felt he had been used by Mitterrand to serve as something of an apologist for the president’s wartime past, Wiesel said, “I don’t want to make any comment. This book must be judged the way it is, with the questions and the answers.”
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