A Country Brave Enough to Face its Terrible Past

On previous trips to Paris, I often passed a plaque outside elementary schools. Several times I noticed flowers left below this plaque. Even with my high school French, I understood the plaque had to do with children deported during the years France was occupied by the Nazis. For good reason, the French call this time in their history “the Dark Years.”

We in 2021 are going through our own dark time with the Covid-19 pandemic engulfing the world. This pandemic has brought poverty, suffering, and death to many. In comparison, our problems, Dan’s and mine, are minor, for we suffer from wanderlust. We have the deep desire to see the world, and the pandemic stopped our travel.

How glad we were in August 2021 when we could cross the Atlantic and explore again. We spent three weeks in Paris, staying at a hotel on Rue Amelot in the Marais, which means marshland. Since the nineteenth century, the Marais has been home to a large population of Ashkenazi Jews, who settled here from Eastern Europe. The area is famous today for beautiful clothing shops and incredibly tasty felafel.

Early in our stay we had a wonderful guide, Alain, who was born and raised in the Marais. We found ourselves beside an elementary school, where Alain translated the plaque.

From 1942 to 1944 more than 11,000 children were deported from France by the Nazis with the active participation of the French government of Vichy and assassins in the death camps because they were born Jews. More than 500 of these children lived in the 3rd Arrondissement and attended the Rue de Turenne school group.
Never forget them.

It dawned on me that we were on the same street mentioned in the plaque, Rue de Turenne. On this street, these children played hopscotch, rode their bikes, and completed their homework. Their voices almost rang out around us. At last, I understood: the French were admitting their complicity in sending these children to their deaths.

As Nazi armies swept across Europe starting in Poland in 1939, people in the defeated countries fled from the violence. Many came to France, especially to Paris. Some may have visited Paris in better times or had seen photos of their monuments to freedom, like the Arc de Triomphe. They believed the French motto: liberty, equality, fraternity. They sought safety in the arms of France, the one country in Europe they hoped would defeat the brutish Nazis.

But their hopes died in the summer of 1944 when the French capitulated, and the Nazis marched into Paris. Not long after this, the occupiers required that Jews register at their local police station. Law-abiding, the Jews did what they were asked. The Nazis bureaucracy was as evil as it was efficient. This program allowed the occupation to identify and exclude Jews from everyday life. This included not just Jewish refugees but French citizens who were Jewish. Beginning in 1941, the Nazis began holding roundups of Jews and sending them to nearby camps such as Drancy. Later the deportees were sent further east to infamous concentration camps, such as Auschwitz, where most met their death.

In the first roundups, Jewish children were not deported. Instead, they were abandoned and left to huddle in empty apartments or wander the streets, where many were taken in by rescue networks as well as by ordinary Parisians. One of the rescue organizations, “The Amelot Committee” started by David Rappaport is named for the street on which we were staying in 2021. So, we were surrounded by this terrible history as well as by these heroes, who risked their own lives for people they did not know.

A few days later Dan and I visited the Memorial de la Shoah in the heart of the Marais. Shoah is a synonym for the Holocaust. On the pavement outside the museum are a series of marble tablets engraved with the names of Jews deported from France as well as French men and women who saved Jews and their “hidden children.” These French people had been declared the Righteous Among Nations, the honor Israel has given them. Even during those Dark Years, these men and women were brave enough to provide a little light.

But what of the French today admitting to the murder of innocents? What do French children think when they read the plaque? Are they afraid this might happen to them today? Does it make them question authority? I hope so. While we want to protect young children from the world’s evil, there is a time when children must learn their country’s history.

I was in fourth grade when I read THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK. How grateful I am that my mother did not censor my reading for this book changed my life. Anne was like me, a young girl flirting with life. Her honesty and self-awareness captivated me. Anne believed all people were basically good, even as she and her family had to hide in an annex from the Nazis who wanted to imprison and murder them. Anne never got to finish the story of her. How I cried when I learned of her suffering and death. Anne has stayed with me all these years, ever reminding just how cruel yet beautiful life can be.

Unfortunately, too many Americans want to bury our terrible history of slavery and racism. Many American parents do not want their children to know the ugly side of our history. They want the wrongs we have committed as a nation buried. We need the courage of the French to admit our terrible past and teach it to our children. Only by acknowledging what happened in this country from its founding until today will we stop repeating the sins of our past and continue this experiment we call America.