Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved, and Died Under Nazi Occupation
Anne Sebba
Prologue
LES PARISIENNES
Paris, mid-July 2015, and the city is swelteringly hot. By 19 July, thunder is in the air. I am sitting on a temporary stage, waiting for the rain, enraptured by an unremarkable woman in her late eighties telling a most remarkable story. Annette Krajcer is one of the few surviving victims of the most notorious round-up in French twentieth-century history. In July 1942, when she was twelve, she and her mother and sister were arrested by French police and taken in buses to a Paris sports stadium, the Vélodrome d’Hiver, along with 13,000 others, including more than 4,000 children. After three days of being held in disgusting conditions with almost nothing to eat or drink and with totally inadequate sanitary facilities, they were crammed into cattle cars and taken to another camp, Pithiviers, fifty miles south of the capital. This was just a little better as they slept on straw-filled bunks and were given some meagre rations. But two weeks later, the girls’ mother was taken away and they never saw her again. Abandoned, they were now taken back to Paris, to a holding camp in the suburb of Drancy. Most of the children who returned with them on this occasion did not survive much longer as they were shipped to Auschwitz and gassed. But Annette and her sister Leah were, miraculously, saved. A cousin who worked as a secretary in the camp saw their names on a list and managed to organize their liberation. They spent the next three years in hiding, but at the end of the war they were reunited with their father, who had been a prisoner of war working on a German farm in the Ardennes.
Today Annette is recounting those events to an audience that is mostly elderly but includes Parisian dignitaries and journalists. Her story is especially distressing because the mention of lists is a reminder of how the Jewish community was itself forced to compile names and addresses of its own members. She cannot, she says, pass a day without thinking of the other 4,000 children who did not have such useful cousins.