Cruel World (64 page)

Extraordinary patience and kindness on the part of caretakers was needed to help the small refugees, usually terrified and sometimes defiant, assume whole new identities. Although this was successful in most cases, not all the families could deal with the children they were given, nor could some of the children manage the needed transformations that required them to respond to different names, forget their relations, traditions,
and former homes, and eat strange food. The less adaptable the child, the more remote his refuge. Denunciations were a constant threat, and there were cases of abuse and exploitation. This meant that the student networks had to be ready to move children at a moment’s notice. Indeed, some were moved many times and often a group house, which was the most dangerous situation, was the only solution.

The Nazis never let up in their pursuit of hidden Jews or their caretakers. Many of the networks were betrayed, and the Jews involved were sent to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Their Dutch protectors went to prisons and camps in Holland; if they were lucky enough to be released, they went underground themselves.

After D-Day, in June 1944, the buildup of German forces in Holland made hiding people ever more difficult, as troops were billeted in farmhouses or came to requisition food. By now the Nazis were looking for downed pilots, forced labor evaders, and Resistance workers as well as for Jews. Houses were raided on the slightest pretext. Ingenious hiding places abounded, and the hidden children became adept at all sorts of dissimulation and evasion. But their experiences were often terrible. One girl, hidden between the springs and mattress of a bed, survived even though German soldiers repeatedly stabbed the mattress with bayonets.
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Other children took to sleeping in the woods, from where many witnessed the arrests of their couriers and caretakers. The safe houses became fewer and often had to be shared with escaping pilots and a variety of other fugitives. By early September 1944, the Allies were so close that thousands of Dutch Nazis fled to the Reich, but liberation would not come for eight more months. During that time, while starvation reigned, hundreds more Resistance workers were arrested and hiding places revealed. In the end, the student networks alone, with the help of an estimated 3,300 to 4,400 households, saved some 1,000 children (and many more would survive in random situations), but most of the
Kinderwerkers
, to this day, are profoundly distressed that they could not do more.

Once the deportations began, underground efforts to save Jewish families and children went on in every occupied country, their methodologies adapting as necessary to their particular variety of German occupation government and their geographical peculiarities. In Denmark, a German shipping official, Georg Duckwitz, informed Danish politicians of SS plans to arrest all 8,000 Jews in the country in one massive operation. So fast did the news spread and so universal was the willingness of Danes
to take Jews in that only 284 prisoners were arrested to fill the two large ships that the SS had commandeered to transport their victims to Poland. A fleet of small fishing boats, with the blatant collusion of many regular German military units, moved most of the rest to Sweden, which in an unprecedented move had publicly broadcast its willingness to receive the Danish Jews.
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The situation in France was more complex. The country was unique among the conquered nations in having an unoccupied zone run by the autonomous government in Vichy, which still had certain powers in the German-controlled Occupied Zone. This was convenient for the Germans, who lacked sufficient manpower to replace the French agencies, among them the police. The Vichy regime, deluding itself that it was maintaining control in its country and assuring future influence for itself in Germany’s New Order in Europe, cooperated in major fashion with the Germans and had even beaten them to the punch when it came to restrictive legislation. This was not difficult, for, as previously indicated, the ideology of Pétain’s National Revolution was remarkably compatible with that of the Nazis in many areas. Within weeks of the French surrender, prohibitions on anti-Semitic articles in the press had been rescinded. On October 3, 1940, a Vichy
Statut des juifs
, echoing the anti-Jewish laws of the Reich, relegated all Jews in France, native or foreign, to second-class status. The next day, another law authorized local officials to intern foreign Jews at will or to require those who could support themselves outside the internment camps to live in specified localities under police supervision. The German authorities, meanwhile, to the distress of the French, were concentrating on pushing as many Jews as possible into unoccupied Vichy and establishing their own racial agencies in Paris. Of particular interest to the Nazis was a central Jewish organization of the type already extant in the Reich and Holland, which they would be able to use to enforce ordinances, produce a census of Jews, promote emigration, and exploit Jewish assets.

Anxious to retain control of these matters in both their zone and the German-controlled areas, the Vichy government, in March 1941, hastily formed its own Jewish agency, the Commissariat-General for Jewish Affairs, which constantly issued new regulations. This was fine with the Germans, who could now leave the blame and bureaucratic aspects of administering anti-Jewish programs to the French. Soon the anti-Jewish laws were so complicated that Vichy had to publish a special guidebook for lower-level officials.
²³
But the French were far too lenient for the Nazis. Despite more and more stringent residence rules and the ferocious
Aryanization of Jewish businesses, the Pétain government continued to exempt war veterans, long-established Jewish families, relations of Vichy higher-ups, and celebrities of various kinds from the harsher regulations. Jewish youths were soon banished from the Chantiers de la Jeunesse, but younger children would attend French schools throughout the war and the universities were still allowed to allot 3 percent of their classes to Jews. In addition, the byzantine French bureaucracy, much of which had survived the invasion, slowed the emigration process, even for those who could obtain visas, to a crawl.
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Impatient with all this, in June 1941 the Nazis required a new census of Jews in Vichy France, and by November had forced all Jewish organizations to unite in the Union Générale des Israélites de France (UGIF). In December all personal documents of Jews had to be stamped with a “J.” On the fourteenth of that month, the Germans announced, among other things, that deportations of “criminal Judeo-Bolshevik elements” would soon begin and decreed that the sheltering of wanted Jews was a felony. Vichy protests of these tough measures were of no avail. In March 1942 the first group of more than 1,000 Jews was sent from the internment camp at Drancy, just outside Paris, to Auschwitz, and the pressure continued to mount. On June 7, 1942, all Jews in the Occupied Zone were required to wear yellow stars, one of the few measures steadfastly rejected by the Vichy government and never instituted in their zone. Two weeks later 5,000 more were deported. It was only the beginning: at a meeting in Berlin on June 11, Himmler had ordered that 100,000 Jews be sent east “for labor service” from both zones of France. The process would be supervised by a new official from Himmler’s command, Higher SS and Police Leader Carl Albrecht Oberg, who had had plenty of experience in Poland, and who would not be restrained by the scruples of the regular Army. On June 27 a German emissary duly informed Vichy Prime Minister Pierre Laval that he would be required to provide 50,000 Jews for deportation effective immediately.
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This was not quite what Vichy had in mind for French Jews, but it was the perfect opportunity for them to rid themselves of the foreign and stateless refugees who filled the terrible internment camps and were scattered about the countryside. Those who lived in supervised residence areas could be sent to camps at any time by order of the departmental prefects and, eventually, the supply could be sustained by further limiting the emigration of foreign Jews. “Foreign” was defined as anyone who had come to France after January 1, 1935, even if they had been naturalized. Later this would be rolled back to 1933, but Nazi efforts to push the limit
to 1927 were refused by Pétain himself.
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The Germans, interested mainly in filling their trains, and intending to deport all the French Jews in the fullness of time, agreed to begin with the foreigners, who would be supplied by the French authorities.

In France, as everywhere, the pace of deportation, once under way, would be staggering. In an operation unbelievably named Spring Wind
(Vent printanier)
, 28,000 Jews were arrested in the Paris region on July 16 and 17. Instead of a theater, the French operation would once again make use of the Vélodrome d’Hiver stadium as a staging area. The arrests were not random. Lists had been prepared using the meticulously maintained census and residence records of the Paris police. Children could not be left behind. In the end about 13,000 Jews were detained in this sweep, of whom 7,000, including 4,000 children, were jammed into the stadium, where, once again, no sanitation, food, water, or bedding of any kind were provided during the week they were held there. The Germans were not pleased at the 15,000-person shortfall, due in large part to leaked warnings and deliberate inefficiencies on the part of the French police, who had done the rounding up.

From the Vél d’Hiv the Jews were taken to various internment camps and finally to Drancy, which, like Westerbork in Holland, would now change from a refugee facility to the main deportation camp in the north of France. There French administrators, until they were replaced by Germans in July 1943, decided who would go on the trains. The more “French” you were, the better the chance for delay in departure. Among children, preference was given those with French nationality whose parents were both still at liberty; but infants and toddlers who were with their mothers were not in this lucky group, nor were children under sixteen with only one free parent or those between sixteen and twenty whose parents had been deported or soon would be. If children were in the camp hospital when the rest of the family went, it was too bad, and they were left behind for the time being.
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The situation of unaccompanied children at Drancy, often so small that they did not know their own names, was dreadful beyond belief:

The Germans, desirous of having able-bodied workers constitute 90 percent of the early transports, were at first not enthusiastic about taking children along, and indeed soon began dumping them in Vichy. But after repeated requests from Laval, who also did not wish to be burdened with their care, and whose minions found the young useful for filling their quotas for the relentlessly appearing freight cars, the issue went to Eichmann himself, who finally agreed to their inclusion. Soon carloads made up entirely of children would leave Drancy.
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The scenes at their departures made clear why the Nazis had not wanted to deal with the process: “The day of the deportations the children were awakened at 5:00 a.m. sometimes a whole dormitory of 100, seemingly overcome by uncontrollable panic and dread, no longer heard the soothing words of the grownups … then gendarmes were called to carry down the children who were screaming in terror.”
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Once this first wave from the Occupied Zone was on its way, deportations began in Vichy. The Nazi quota fillers had high hopes for this area, having mistakenly assumed that there were 40,000 foreign Jews in the internment camps alone. Clearly expecting to net French Jews as well as foreign ones, the Nazis set a quota of 32,000 from Vichy France to be delivered by September. Deportations from the internment camps began in the second week of August, and a general roundup was to take place from August 26 to August 28. The difference was that parents were at first allowed to leave their children behind if they wished.
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The agencies that had been involved with the physical well-being of children in the camps now turned to rescue. This was nothing new, especially for operatives of the French rescue organization, OSE, who had been moving families and children illegally from the Occupied Zone to Vichy for many months. But now time was short and the Nazis’ appetite more voracious. The formal OSE office in Paris was closed and replaced with a “social club” in an obscure location where children could be left by their parents and taken to refuge with gentile families. This office operated
throughout the war, at great peril to its workers, and is said to have saved some 700 children.
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In Vichy news of the deportations led to frantic efforts to extract children from the camps. The methodology of the French sometimes aided this effort. When a transport was to take place, all the apparently “deportable” Jews in a camp, plus those collected from the countryside, would be herded into a sorting pen. French officials would then decide, case by case, who might be exempt. All sorts of excuses, from being a war veteran to baptismal certificates, were brought forth; lives could depend on some tiny element of documentation. The child welfare workers, of various religions and nationalities, used every conceivable argument and deception, and were constantly helped by sympathetic officials. They pretended to be Swiss Red Cross workers, falsified passes, and wore down the deporting committees with endless arguments. Success in exempting the children was not the occasion for joy; the parents’ decision to part with a child was no easier here than anywhere else: