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Holocaust / 'Do not cry over me'
By Gaby Levin
Tags: Drancy, Israel News

Mihtavim Midrancy (Letters from the Drancy Camp), edited by Antoine Sabbagh, with an introduction by Denis Peschanski (translated into Hebrew from the French by Adina Kaplan); Matar Publishing House, 292 pages, NIS 89

There was seemingly nothing that destined Drancy to become the site of the terrible drama that began in the summer of 1941 and ended in August 1944. The La Muette neighborhood, only four kilometers from Paris, was supposed to be a modest residential quarter along the lines of those "garden neighborhoods" that popped up in the early 1930s in the suburbs of other large French cities.

But in September 1939, when World War II broke out, construction had not been completed yet on the housing complex intended for gendarmes and their families - four high-rise buildings surrounding a lower, horseshoe-shaped structure. The fact that several families of gendarmes had already taken up residence in the towers aided the decision to turn the U-shaped structure, which remained without doors and windows, into a detention camp. It was easy to surround the structure with double barbed-wire fences and guard towers.
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One hundred and thirty letters from inmates at the Drancy transit camp appeared in a collection published in France in 2002, and were recently translated into Hebrew. The letters call forth 130 chilling voices that express astonishment, anxiety, courage and the hope of returning home, mixed with a naivete that is surprising in view of the determination of the killing machine that would soon destroy them. The selection of letters was edited by Antoine Sabbagh, a professor at the Sorbonne and acting director of the National Archives of France. The letters were somehow preserved by the families and later entrusted to the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation (founded in 1943 and today part of the Shoah Memorial, a Paris Holocaust museum). The book's introduction, placing Drancy in the context of the period, was written by Prof. Denis Peschanski, an expert on 20th-century social history.

Only 2,500 survived

Starting in June 1940, French prisoners of war were temporarily interned at Drancy, prior to being transferred to camps in Germany. Thereafter the place remained empty for several months until August 20, 1941, the day on which the first major roundup of Paris Jews began. Over the course of five days, buses delivered 4,232 Jewish men to Drancy, only 1,500 of whom were French citizens. Although the camp was officially under the command of SS officer Theodor Dannecker, whom Holocaust survivors have called a violent and merciless psychopath, in practice, responsibility devolved on French gendarmes.

The first transport left for Auschwitz-Birkenau in the spring of 1942, carrying 1,112 prisoners. Under the command of Heinz Rothke, Dannecker's former assistant, Drancy became France's primary concentration camp, to which prisoners were shipped from elsewhere. Between 1942 and 1944, 67 transports departed from Drancy, taking 76,000 Jews to their deaths.

The place was not meant to hold more than 5,000 people, but during the big roundups in the summer of 1942, it contained more than 7,000 men, women and children. Some 3,000 perished at Drancy itself, many of them suicides. Drancy belonged to the Germans, but the French gendarmes who were in charge of guarding the transit camp displayed an overzealous loyalty to the conquerors. Only a handful showed any compassion for the people headed for death.

In July 1943 the camp came under the command of Alois Brunner - an enthusiastic disciple of Adolf Eichmann's - but his eagerness to speed up the pace of transports was thwarted by a wartime shortage of trains. On August 16, as the Allied forces advanced, Brunner set fire to the camp and sent another 51 inmates to their deaths, although 39 managed to escape (including the aviation industrialist Marcel Dassault and the businessman Jean Frydman).

Out of some 80,000 Jews who were sent from France to the death camps, only 2,500 survived. Simone Veil, later one of France's most outstanding politicians and the first elected president of the European parliament, was a 16-year-old girl when she was brought from Nice to Drancy with her family. She was taken to Auschwitz together with her mother and sister; her father and brother were sent to Kaunas (Kovno) in Lithuania, where they were murdered. Veil's mother did not survive the death march. Veil went on to become one of the most prominent figures in France, heading a Holocaust survivors organization and becoming honorary president of the Shoah Memorial Foundation.

The letters in this collection suggest that none of the people who were brought to Drancy knew what awaited them. The poet Max Jacob, who was arrested for being a Jew even though he had converted to Christianity and quit Paris for an ascetic life in a monastery, deluded himself to the end. ?What might it have been were I not protected up to a painful point, I do not know, but I am protected in high places, higher than I can say,? he wrote on November 1, 1942. He died of pneumonia in Drancy.

There were indeed inmates who managed to secure their release thanks to connections. Such was the case with the writer Tristan Bernard, who had claimed before his detention that "they don't arrest someone whose name appears in the encyclopedia," and who was freed with the help of his friend and fellow playwright Sacha Guitry, who was said to have "warm" relations with the occupation authorities.

A jar of preserves

The letters, which are arranged chronologically, contain numerous details about living conditions in Drancy: the hunger, the cold and the intolerable hygiene. Most inmates took advantage of their right to request goods in return for coupons. One woman asked her sister to send her a jar of preserves, in a letter describing the circumstances of her arrest on July 16, 1942 - the first day of the Paris roundups of Jews who held French citizenship, which came to be known as "La Rafle du Vel d'Hiv" ("The Great Raid of the Velodrome d'Hiver," a winter cycling stadium in Paris).

There are also letters of another sort in the collection, from individuals outside Drancy. The wife of a French soldier imprisoned in Germany, for instance, wrote in April 1942 to the Vichy commissioner for Jewish affairs, Xavier Vallat, to suggest that Jews be sent to the camps in Germany in exchange for her husband. A letter signed "M.D." and dated September 10, 1941, instructed Marshal Petain: "Sentence them [the Jews] to eternal hard labor, under the conditions of an animal, obedient, submissive, without money ... Confiscate all of their property for the poor!" But there is also a letter from a French Catholic demanding that Petain stop persecuting Jews and free those who had been arrested.

The style of inmates' letters varies according to the period of incarceration, since those who were brought to Drancy in 1941 did not know what those arrested in 1943 could already guess. They filled pages from school notebooks in cramped handwriting, using every inch to convey messages, sometimes in code.

It is heartbreaking to read the letter of a 12-year-old boy who asks the director of the prisons organization for a little bread in exchange for the coupons entitling him to receive packages, since he no longer has parents to send him packages. The boy and the three younger siblings left in his charge were later killed in the gas chambers.

Another boy, identity unknown, wrote on July 18, 1942: "Dear Marshal of France, don't let them take my mother. I am a small boy of 10 and today is my birthday. I am French and a Catholic, my mother's parents were Jews. I salute you as though I were your soldier."

On March 27, 1942, Jean Leon wrote to his wife: ?We are en route to an unknown destination. We have no idea. Rumors are flying: Germany, Poland, also the Pyrenees. We?ll see. Travel conditions are terrible, but morale remains very high. Au revoir, my beloved.? And in August 1942, Ruth Cahn wrote: ?My dearest little Jeanette, a few words to say goodbye to you. Do not cry over me, my turn has come after so very many.?

In the collection's final letter, Marc Moise Blum writes to his family on August 11, 1944: "Dear ones, I am on the Vittel train to where? I do not forget you ... Courage and faith. I shall see you all God willing ... Vive la France."

Gaby Levin is a frequent contributor to the Hebrew edition of Haaretz Books
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