President Charles de Gaulle of France “may or may not be an anti-Semite” but his statements about the character of the Jewish people, made at his press conference last month, are “unbelievable and harmful,” Mannes Sperber, noted French author, said here last night. Mr. Sperber spoke at the annual dinner of the World Federation of Bergen Belsen Associations when he accepted the 1967 Remembrance Award for “excellence and distinction in literature.”
He told the assemblage that “the tragedy of de Gaulle is that he is an undefeated victor” and warned that “he remains faithful to the ideology of his youth and may even go back to some evil lesson of his former masters–for instance the anti-Semitism of Charles Maurra–the Maurras who was to the end of his life one of the leading ideologists of Petain and his Vichy regime.”
Josef Rosensaft, president of the federation, reported that the federation is resisting attempts of the French authorities to open the unmarked mass graves at Bergen Belsen to find and remove the remains of 139 French nationals for reburial in France. He said this would be “a desecration of the memory of the martyred dead” and promised that “we shall never allow the graves of Belsen to be opened and desecrated.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
