According to French Nazi hunter and lawyer Serge Klarsfeld, 11,104 Jewish children were arrested and deported from France to their deaths in Nazi extermination camps during World War II.
The figure appears in a book by Klarsfeld that was published this week and which contains the names and, in many cases, photographs of the young victims.
The book, “Memorial to the Jewish Children Deported from France,” was created with the help of his organization, the Sons and Daughters of Jews Deported from France, and provides a close-up view of the deportations, even going so far as to provide the exact addresses where the Jewish children were arrested.
“This is not a book of death, but a book of life,” Klarsfeld said in an interview. “It is as if the over 1,500 children photographed were testifying at the witness stand about the crimes committed against them.”
“We wanted to save the memory of those children from oblivion,” he said.
He also had another goal in mind in writing the book: to set the record straight about the extent to which the wartime Vichy regime supported the Nazi program to exterminate European Jewry.
“We also wished to make it impossible to rehabilitate the Vichy regime, which helped the Nazis in their anti-Jewish actions. Let us not forget that at least 75 percent of those children were arrested by the French police,” Klarsfeld said.
BELIEVES PAPON WILL BE TRIED
According to Klarsfeld, Rene Bousquet, Vichy’s police chief between 1942 and 1944, can be held personally responsible for almost 7,000 deportations.
Formally charged with the deportation of 2,000 Jewish children, Bousquet was shot dead at the age of 82 in June 1993 by a non-Jewish self-styled avenger.
Klarsfeld also spoke during the interview about the possibility of bringing to trial Maurice Papon, the last remaining French citizen who has been indicted for crimes against humanity.
Papon was a high-ranking member of the French administration in charge of the Bordeaux area in southwestern France. At a time when his region was not yet occupied by the Nazis, he signed orders to arrest and deport 1,690 Jews, most of whom never returned from the Nazi death camps.
Many here think that Papon, 84, will never be brought to trial, but Klarsfeld believes that the judge in the case will decide in favor of a trial.
“This would be a major success,” Klarsfeld said. “Given the delays of the justice system,” Papon could well die before legal proceedings are brought against him.
To date, only one French citizen, Paul Touvier, has been convicted of crimes against humanity. Touvier was sentenced to life imprisonment in April for his role in the assassination of seven Jewish hostages in Rillieux-la-Pape, located near Lyon in southeastern France, on June 29, 1944. Touvier was then local head of the intelligence service of the militia, the 30,000-member collaborationist civilian armed force created by the Vichy regime.
Another Frenchman, Jean Leguay, was indicted in 1979 for organizing the first mass roundup of Jews in France in 1942. He died of natural causes in 1989 at the age of 79.
Reflecting on his Nazi-hunting activities, Klarsfeld said, “Our work is practically done.”
During the interview, Klarsfeld said he disagreed with the opinion that most French people supported Vichy’s anti-Semitic policies.
“The conclusions I am drawing at the bottom line of this book is that no other country in Europe protected its Jews and particularly the Jewish children the way France did,” he said.
“We can come up with actual figures. In Italy or in Belgium, 20 percent of the Jews deported were children, while in France, they were only — if we may use this word — about 13 percent.”
But, added Klarsfeld, after the summer of 1942, “the French witnessed the arrest of whole families.
“Before that, the French were numbed by their defeat (at the hands of the Nazis), and they accepted without any special displeasure the confiscation of Jewish belongings and the anti-Jewish discriminations.”
But “when the French authorities started to arrest families, the situation changed,” he said.
“Memorial to the Jewish Children Deported from France” is not the first book Klarsfeld has written about the deportations of French children.
Klarsfeld, whose father died in Auschwitz, wrote “The Children of Izieu: A Jewish Tragedy,” published in 1984, which tells the story of the deportation to Auschwitz of 44 Jewish children and seven adults from the French village of Izieu.
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.
