Today is Yom Ha Shoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, and this year's theme is taken from Pastor Niemoller's poem.
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
This week Peter and I went to see 'Sarah's Key', directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner and starring the redoubtable Kristin Scott-Thomas. It is a wonderful film and it made me cry. I had wanted to see it for a long time and it has only now struck me how appropriate it was that we should have seen at this time of Yom Ha Shoah.
It is the story of an American journalist, married to a Frenchman, who discovers that the family appartment in the Marais, into which she is moving with her husband and teenage daughter, once belonged to the parents of Sara Starzinsky. At 4 am on the night of 16th - 17th July, the Starzinsky's, along with over 13,000 other foreign born French Jews including their children, are brutally rounded up by the French police. Almost half of them are thrown into the Vel' d'Hiv, the covered winter cycling velodrome in the 15 eme arrondisement. There, they are left to fester in blistering heat, with no food, water or toilets, for five days, before being shunted off to the Beaune-la-Rolande internment camp. The key is the key to the wardrobe, about which I will say no more.
At Beaune-la-Rolande, where 2,773 people are sent, the children are separated from their parents. Fifteen hundred sobbing and distraught children leave on the last convoy, No. 20, in terrible conditions via Drancy, to Auschwitz. Sara is not one of them.
The film creates the horror of the 'Raffle' and the Vel d'Hiv. It is a shocking story because this atrocity was carried out by Frenchmen, not Nazis. Jacques Chirac apologised for this crime against humanity in 1995. The question remains, though. Where were the people who spoke up, spoke out? I am sure that there were many but their voices were drowned out by the others, the silent ones, the complicit ones, the greedy ones.
Closer to home, in St Girons, on 26th August 1942, two families were affected by the long arm of the brutal law of the German occupiers. It stretched uncompromisingly right into the southern 'zone libre'. One was the Silbermann family, originally from Jordanow in Poland, with their two teenage boys, Maurice, who was sixteen, and Leon, who was a year younger. The other was the family of two-year old Fanny Reich, both families arrested as part of the 'grand raffle' of foreign Jews ordered by the Nazis in the southern, unoccupied zone. They were taken from their home at 48 rue Sainte-Valier, next to the church, and interned at Le Vernet. They included her grandfather, Oscar Reich, who had been born in Vienna in 1885 [57], her father, Wolf, who had been born in Przemysy in Poland in 1903 [38], her mother, Mindla, who had been born in Zdunska Wola in Poland in 1901 [41] and her brother, Joseph, who had been born in Liege in Belgium in 1932 [10].
The family had lived in Liege since Hitler made his intentions known in the 1930's, where they had moved from Poland. They had thought that they were safe there because, so they must have believed, the Fuhrer's intentions were directed eastwards towards the country of their birth. When the German Blitzkrieg swept through Holland and Belgium in May 1940, so shortly after Fanny's birth on 21st February, they fled south and finished up in the sleepy market town of St Girons. Looking up to the great expanse of the Pyrennees from their little home by the church, they must have believed that finally they were safe. There was not a Wehrmacht or SS uniform to be seen, for St Girons was deep into the unoccupied zone.
So when they came for the Jews, they came quickly, and quietly, at 4 o'clock in the morning. In a closely guarded military operation, the armed policemen crept up on their unsuspecting prey in an operation called 'Spring Breeze'. Their victims did not get the chance to flee.
Little Fanny, just a toddler, was the youngest of 32 Jewish children and adolescents arrested that day in Aulus-les-Bains, Bordes-sur-Lez, Castillon, Foix, Le Peyrat, Ludies, Pamiers and Savignac-les-Ormeaux, as well as St Girons. According to one eye witness account, the police were in the full battle dress of blue uniforms, black tunics, black boots and silver-braided black caps of the French police. They carried revolvers at their waists. We cannot imagine the terror in innocent people's hearts that they must have created. In total, almost three hundred foreign born Jews were arrested in Ariege that day by the French police. They were taken to the internment camp at Le Vernet with just the clothes that they were standing up in and one small bag each. The French Jews were given a few months reprieve until their time, too, came.
On 1st September 1942, Fanny and her family left the station of Le Vernet in a convoy of 293 Jews, in filthy and overcrowded cattle trucks, bound for Drancy. They arrived at Drancy the following day. On 4th September, Fanny, together with Oscar, her grandfather, Wolf, her father, Mindla, her mother and Joseph, her brother left Drancy, with 248 other Ariegeois Jews. They were on Convoy No. 28 destined for Auschwitz. We feel sick to our stomachs at their fate.
Who in St Girons spoke up, I wonder. Did anyone speak out? It is almost seventy years ago but maybe someone knows of a brave soul who can answer my question? I should love to know. Fanny Reich is commemorated in St Girons, where there is a school named in the memory of an innocent little life snuffed out before it had ever properly begun. In death, she has become a symbol of hope; the hope that nothing like this will happen again. It must not, for we all shall speak up, speak out. For we will, won't we?
