My
Reservations About The French
By Robert Fisk
03 December 2006
The
Independent
I still possess a 1930s photograph
of a cosy old Beirut street, its Ottoman houses draped with flowers,
an ageing Citroën just visible at the end of the cobbled roadway,
trees shading the narrow pavements on each side. "Rue Pétain,"
it says on the caption. My old poilu - Dad - he of the third battle
of the Somme - would teach me Pétain's pledge at Verdun. "Ils
ne passeront pas." They shall not pass.
But of course, Pétain's
patriotism in 1916 - his refusal to permit the Kaiser's army to advance
beyond the Meuse - became France's shame in 1940. When it reached Beirut
in 1941, the Anglo-Australian invasion force which drove Vichy France
from Lebanon stripped Pétain's name from the wall of that Ottoman
street and Bill Fisk thereafter spoke of him with ambiguity. Bill, like
most Englishmen and women - and many, though by no means all, Frenchmen
and women - could not forgive the man who collaborated with Hitler's
Germany.
I'm reticent about the French
for three reasons. Firstly, because some years ago, driven by a sense
of outrage and dark curiosity, I attended a mass for the dead in central
Paris. It was celebrated by an American priest and was held for - well,
yes, Marshal Philippe Pétain. With a dear friend and colleague,
I sat in the nave and watched more than 100 mostly elderly middle-class
ladies and gentlemen - faces set and grave, sinister and secretive amid
the darkness of the church - come to remember the leader of Vichy France
who replaced Liberty, Equality and Fraternity with Work, Family and
Homeland, and sent his country's Jews, along with thousands of foreign
Jewish refugees, to Auschwitz with an enthusiasm that surprised even
the Nazis.
Secondly, because I have
just finished reading Irène Némirovsky's brilliant - no,
let me speak frankly - transformative account of the Fall of France,
Suite Française, a novel which was intended by its young Jewish
author to be her modern-day version of Tolstoy's War and Peace. Suite
Française is one of those rare books that you can put down at
night and wake up dreaming about, desperate to discover if the revolting
Monsieur Corbin reaches his bank in Tours after the flight from Paris,
whether the courageous Michaud couple will survive the Nazi onslaught,
or if the beautiful Cécile - her unfaithful, unloved husband
a French prisoner-of-war - will succumb to the educated, sometimes childlike,
sometimes desperately loving German officer billeted in her home.
Némirovsky was born
in Kiev in 1903, the daughter of a prominent banker, a refugee from
the Russian Revolution, then a refugee from Paris in 1940 whose earlier
novels were wildly successful but who could no longer be published under
Nazi decrees. She fled Paris with her Jewish husband Michel Epstein
to the village of Issy l'Evêque in the German-occupied zone, both
marked out for extermination, but all the while writing in tiny, spider-like
handwriting in small notebooks her epic of betrayal and heroism and
the steady, sad slippage into collaboration which all occupied people
must suffer. Her bank account is blocked. "You must know that if
this money must be held in a blocked bank account," she pleads
with her French publisher, "it would be of no use to me whatsoever."
Suite Française was
to be composed of five books. Némirovsky completed only two -
Storm in June (the 1940 flight from Paris) and Dolce, the first year
of occupation in a small French village. Incredibly, the German soldiers
living there are treated with a sensitivity bordering on gentleness,
although with great cynicism. "Since the Germans (in the village)
mistrusted their tendency to be tactless," Némirovsky writes,
"they were particularly careful of what they said to the locals;
they were therefore accused of being hypocrites."
There is a wonderful scene
in which Lucille and her would-be German lover are viewed through the
eyes of a little girl: "The German and the lady were talking quietly.
He had turned white as a sheet too. Now and again, she could hear him
holding back his loud voice, as if he wanted to shout or cry but didn't
dare ... She vaguely thought he might be talking about his wife and
the lady's husband. She heard him say several times: 'If you were happy...'"
After Hitler's invasion of
Russia, the German unit in Némirovsky's village leaves for the
Eastern front. "The men began singing, a grave, slow song that
drifted away into the night. Soon the road was empty. All that remained
of the German regiment was a little cloud of dust." This is Borodino-like
in its magnificence, Tolstoyan indeed.
But Némirovsky did
not complete her epic; three books are still unwritten although we have
her notes for them. (Their titles were to be Captivity, Battles, Peace.)
She was arrested and sent to Auschwitz, where she died in the atrocious
Birkenau infirmary on 17 August 1942. Believing her still alive, her
brave husband Michel appealed to her publishers for help, to the Red
Cross, to the German ambassador to Paris, to Pétain himself.
The direct result of his letter to the old man was his own arrest and
dispatch to Auschwitz. He was sent straight to the gas chamber.
In all, 100,000 Jews were
sent from France to the death camps, 20,000 through the transit camp
at Drancy outside Paris, almost 2,000 of them children. Four hundred
of these children were handed over by the French authorities. All this
was recalled at the 14th Jewish Film Festival in Vienna this week when
Thomas Draschen introduced his film Children's Memories. But imagine
Mr Draschen's rage - and here is my third reason for reticence about
the French - when he discovered that the French embassy in Vienna, which
hosted the film's premiere, deleted the following sentence from its
programme: "11,400 Jewish children from France were handed over
to the Nazis by the French authorities and murdered at Auschwitz."
Why, in God's name, was this
act of censorship permitted? President Jacques Chirac recognised in
1995 that the French state was responsible for the deportation of the
Jews, but somehow the Quai d'Orsay seems to have missed out on this.
Certainly the staff of the French Institute in Vienna didn't get the
message. Should they be sent a complimentary copy of Némirovsky's
agonisingly tragic novel? Or just an invitation to the next mass for
the late Marshal Philippe Pétain of France?
I still possess a 1930s photograph
of a cosy old Beirut street, its Ottoman houses draped with flowers,
an ageing Citroën just visible at the end of the cobbled roadway,
trees shading the narrow pavements on each side. "Rue Pétain,"
it says on the caption. My old poilu - Dad - he of the third battle
of the Somme - would teach me Pétain's pledge at Verdun. "Ils
ne passeront pas." They shall not pass.
But of course, Pétain's
patriotism in 1916 - his refusal to permit the Kaiser's army to advance
beyond the Meuse - became France's shame in 1940. When it reached Beirut
in 1941, the Anglo-Australian invasion force which drove Vichy France
from Lebanon stripped Pétain's name from the wall of that Ottoman
street and Bill Fisk thereafter spoke of him with ambiguity. Bill, like
most Englishmen and women - and many, though by no means all, Frenchmen
and women - could not forgive the man who collaborated with Hitler's
Germany.
I'm reticent about the French
for three reasons. Firstly, because some years ago, driven by a sense
of outrage and dark curiosity, I attended a mass for the dead in central
Paris. It was celebrated by an American priest and was held for - well,
yes, Marshal Philippe Pétain. With a dear friend and colleague,
I sat in the nave and watched more than 100 mostly elderly middle-class
ladies and gentlemen - faces set and grave, sinister and secretive amid
the darkness of the church - come to remember the leader of Vichy France
who replaced Liberty, Equality and Fraternity with Work, Family and
Homeland, and sent his country's Jews, along with thousands of foreign
Jewish refugees, to Auschwitz with an enthusiasm that surprised even
the Nazis.
Secondly, because I have
just finished reading Irène Némirovsky's brilliant - no,
let me speak frankly - transformative account of the Fall of France,
Suite Française, a novel which was intended by its young Jewish
author to be her modern-day version of Tolstoy's War and Peace. Suite
Française is one of those rare books that you can put down at
night and wake up dreaming about, desperate to discover if the revolting
Monsieur Corbin reaches his bank in Tours after the flight from Paris,
whether the courageous Michaud couple will survive the Nazi onslaught,
or if the beautiful Cécile - her unfaithful, unloved husband
a French prisoner-of-war - will succumb to the educated, sometimes childlike,
sometimes desperately loving German officer billeted in her home.
Némirovsky was born
in Kiev in 1903, the daughter of a prominent banker, a refugee from
the Russian Revolution, then a refugee from Paris in 1940 whose earlier
novels were wildly successful but who could no longer be published under
Nazi decrees. She fled Paris with her Jewish husband Michel Epstein
to the village of Issy l'Evêque in the German-occupied zone, both
marked out for extermination, but all the while writing in tiny, spider-like
handwriting in small notebooks her epic of betrayal and heroism and
the steady, sad slippage into collaboration which all occupied people
must suffer. Her bank account is blocked. "You must know that if
this money must be held in a blocked bank account," she pleads
with her French publisher, "it would be of no use to me whatsoever."
Suite Française was to be composed of five books. Némirovsky
completed only two - Storm in June (the 1940 flight from Paris) and
Dolce, the first year of occupation in a small French village. Incredibly,
the German soldiers living there are treated with a sensitivity bordering
on gentleness, although with great cynicism. "Since the Germans
(in the village) mistrusted their tendency to be tactless," Némirovsky
writes, "they were particularly careful of what they said to the
locals; they were therefore accused of being hypocrites."
There is a wonderful scene
in which Lucille and her would-be German lover are viewed through the
eyes of a little girl: "The German and the lady were talking quietly.
He had turned white as a sheet too. Now and again, she could hear him
holding back his loud voice, as if he wanted to shout or cry but didn't
dare ... She vaguely thought he might be talking about his wife and
the lady's husband. She heard him say several times: 'If you were happy...'"
After Hitler's invasion of
Russia, the German unit in Némirovsky's village leaves for the
Eastern front. "The men began singing, a grave, slow song that
drifted away into the night. Soon the road was empty. All that remained
of the German regiment was a little cloud of dust." This is Borodino-like
in its magnificence, Tolstoyan indeed.
But Némirovsky did
not complete her epic; three books are still unwritten although we have
her notes for them. (Their titles were to be Captivity, Battles, Peace.)
She was arrested and sent to Auschwitz, where she died in the atrocious
Birkenau infirmary on 17 August 1942. Believing her still alive, her
brave husband Michel appealed to her publishers for help, to the Red
Cross, to the German ambassador to Paris, to Pétain himself.
The direct result of his letter to the old man was his own arrest and
dispatch to Auschwitz. He was sent straight to the gas chamber.
In all, 100,000 Jews were
sent from France to the death camps, 20,000 through the transit camp
at Drancy outside Paris, almost 2,000 of them children. Four hundred
of these children were handed over by the French authorities. All this
was recalled at the 14th Jewish Film Festival in Vienna this week when
Thomas Draschen introduced his film Children's Memories. But imagine
Mr Draschen's rage - and here is my third reason for reticence about
the French - when he discovered that the French embassy in Vienna, which
hosted the film's premiere, deleted the following sentence from its
programme: "11,400 Jewish children from France were handed over
to the Nazis by the French authorities and murdered at Auschwitz."
Why, in God's name, was this
act of censorship permitted? President Jacques Chirac recognised in
1995 that the French state was responsible for the deportation of the
Jews, but somehow the Quai d'Orsay seems to have missed out on this.
Certainly the staff of the French Institute in Vienna didn't get the
message. Should they be sent a complimentary copy of Némirovsky's
agonisingly tragic novel? Or just an invitation to the next mass for
the late Marshal Philippe Pétain of France?
© 2006 Independent News
and Media Limited
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