The term Zone Libre or Free Zone was highly misleading. Cyprien, Gurs and Les Milles. Like his brother Uszer, Owszija had come to France to find work in his profession. Both probably fled the occupied zone in to seek liberty in the Zone Libre Yet Owszija was to be interned in Rivesaltes and sent to the forced labor camp of Soudeilles. And deported from there back to the Occupied Zone, to Drancy, where the authorities would put him on a cattle car bound for Auschwitz.
We are used to thinking about Germany and Nazis -- but France, the country of liberty and human rights? Yet one cannot escape the fact that the Vichy goverment colluded with the Nazis. And what of the French citizens? I'm swept into a gust of reading, drawn especially to personal or detailed accounts, trying to make sense of this messy and confusing business that was France during World War II.
The division into zones --the Occupied Zone in the north and the Free Zone administered by the Vichy collaborationist government, which existed until November, when Germany invaded the Free Zone and France was entirely occupied-- the different policies for foreign and French Jews, the increasing persecution as the French adapted, responded to or even resisted German demands.
Rue Ordener, Rue Labat , French philosopher Sarah Kofman's chilling account of how she and her mother were hidden by a Christian woman, who became her surrogate mother-- and encouraged her to reject both her Jewishness and her own mother. A Train in Winter , the unrelentingly depressing story of women in the French resistance, the reprisals and punishments for their actions. Dora Bruder , Patrick Modiano's search for facts about a year old Jewish girl in Paris who disappeared in and was killed in Auschwitz in The difference: My relatives were all foreign Jews even though the brothers were well established professionals in France.
She is forced to wear the yellow star that identifies her as a Jew, subjected to the long list of antisemitic prohibitions, barred from her studies. As French Jews also are deported to 'the East,' she loses friends and neighbors every day. And as a volunteer for the Union Generale des Israelites de France UGIF -- the Union of French Jews which provided social welfare for Jews but worked under German authority during the occupation, she witnesses terrible scenes: orphaned children and elderly torn from their hospital beds, deported only in order to satisfy the demand for bodies on a convoy.
Wirz was born in Switzerland in and moved to the United States in He lived in the The patent office awards U. Patent No. The resolution, drafted by future U. Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Art, Literature, and Film History. World War I. Within weeks, the Germans had pushed their way deep into France, and the French government was forced to make an impossible decision: regroup in their North African colonies and keep fighting, or sign an armistice with Germany.
While Prime Minister Paul Reynaud argued they should keep fighting, the majority of government officials felt otherwise. On June 22, , France signed an armistice with Germany, and by July 9 parliament had voted to 80 to abandon the previous government, the Third Republic. The German troops occupied the northern half of the country, taking 2 million French soldiers as prisoners of war, while the French government worked from its new base in Vichy, a spa city in the center of the country.
Most nations recognized the Vichy government as legitimate; the U. Meanwhile, Charles de Gaulle objected to the legitimacy of the Vichy government from London, where he began working for the Free French movement.
Was Vichy a fascist regime? The break from the Third Republic came about in part due to the shock and humiliation of being so rapidly bested by the German military, and French leaders were looking everywhere for an explanation for their defeat. That blame fell squarely on the shoulders of Communists, socialists and Jews. Jewish people in particular had been experiencing animosity for decades, since the Dreyfus Affair of the s.
But all the foreign Jews were put into camps, they cracked down on dissent, and it was in some ways increasingly a police state. Did the regime collaborate with Nazis out of self-preservation, or did it have its own agenda?
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