Jewish resistance in France

• Published in: The Jerusalem post
• Main Author: Sivan, Gabriel
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Jerusalem The Jerusalem Post Ltd 23.04.1999

RESCUE AS RESISTANCE: How Jewish Organizations Fought the Holocaust in France by Lucien Lazare. Translated by Jeffrey M. Green. New York, Columbia University Press. xii + 400 pp. Price not stated. Watching the recent Mosley television series or reading new works about the Holocaust, I often try to imagine how the British might have reacted to a Nazi invasion in 1940. An underground resistance movement would probably have been organized, but how many Englishmen would have risked their lives to save the 370,000 Jews threatened with annihilation? If the behavior of civilized Western nations like the Dutch and French (not to mention the free Swiss) is anything to go by, we might never have survived. Lucien Lazare aims "to make the battle of the Jews of France under German occupation better known, for this battle has too often been minimized, even hidden from view." As a member of the International Center for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem, he has had access to Hebrew books and other sources that [Paul] Webster could not consult. Many of these were written by French Jews (e.g., Moshe Catane, Shmuel Rene Kapel, Andre Neher, Simon Schwarzfuchs, and Claude Vige, who settled in Israel). As an "insider," who played an active part in the Jewish resistance movement, Lazare has a first-hand knowledge of the subject, but modestly refrains from quoting his own wartime experiences.