The historian Debra Workman believes that ADIR, the association for returnees largely set up by Geneviève de Gaulle, understood the range of diseases resulting from the deportation far earlier than governmental and medical authorities. ‘Only in 1953, eight years after their return, did the Ministry for Veterans’ Affairs create a special commission to study the pathology of the deportation in order to develop a comprehensive, systematic approach to care for the health needs of those who had been deported.’ In addition, the experience of those deported for political reasons and those deported because they were Jews was vastly different. De Gaulle himself never said anything about the Jews nor apologized for their treatment.*
Clearly those deported merely because they were Jews needed their own repatriation organization too. Three weeks after Paris had been liberated, André and Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar helped set up one such information network, the Service Central des Déportés Israélites (SCDI). Jacqueline became editor of its monthly bulletin, using reports from Switzerland, Poland and Belgium in attempts to bring families, sundered by war, together again. For Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar, the hunger and fear of the Occupation while André was in the Jewish Combat organization, a resistance network in the south, as well as the trauma of witnessing the post-war dislocation of survivors, turned her, unusually, from a non-observant Jew into a deeply committed one, ‘seized by conscience’. Both she and André – who had so narrowly survived deportation himself by jumping off a train – had grown up in an atmosphere where ‘they adored French culture and Latin and Greek took precedence over Hebrew …’. Pre-war they had been French citizens first and Jews second. Now they had become just ‘Juifs’. So, deeply concerned also not to forget the fate of the foreign Jews, they became ever more immersed in Judaism until, as their daughter Sylvie later wrote, it ‘devoured’ their thinking. Some of their friends, finding the couple’s concerns obsessive, became estranged, and even Sylvie protested that they thought about little else.
But they were not alone. Even in a city where so many of the returning Jews internalized their fate, or else, finding it too painful to speak of, remained silent either to protect their children or, in the inimitable phrase of Romain Gary, chose not to speak ‘pour ne pas compliquer les choses’.*
Within a year, her close colleague Andrée Salomon left her work in France for OSE – the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, which had played a critical role in saving Jewish children in France during the Occupation – and emigrated to Israel, where she worked on the OSE archives and tracked the fate of ‘her’ children, now scattered around the world.
The children who survived now created a special problem. Some 11,600 Jewish children in France had been deported, all of whom perished in the camps, but many had been hidden in France. Vivette Samuel was the daughter of two well-educated Ukrainian Jews who had settled in Paris during the First World War. According to Vivette, who had worked for OSE since 1940 when she was twenty-two, 72,400 under eighteen years old who were not deported survived. About 62,000 of them were able to stay with parents or were directly entrusted by them to institutions or to non-Jewish families, and the issues involved in reintegrating them into a normal life were unprecedented. In addition, the plight of the Jews was, in the post-war context of a continent in ruins, just one problem among many. Thérèse Bonney, the New York-born photojournalist who was the first American to win a scholarship to the Sorbonne, had been documenting for years the appalling conditions in which many children were now living. Already in 1943 her book Europe’s Children had been considered shocking. Lee Miller, who moved on from Paris to Germany, witnessed similar horrors and the photographs she took of children in a hospital in Vienna are among the most harrowing and important of her entire wartime oeuvre. She wrote:
For an hour I watched a baby die. He was dark blue when I first saw him. He was the dark dusty blue of these waltz-filled Vienna nights, the same colour as the striped garb of the Dachau skeletons, the same imaginary blue as Strauss’s Danube. I’d thought all babies looked alike, but that was healthy babies; there are many faces for the dying. This wasn’t a two months baby, he was a skinny gladiator. He gasped and fought and struggled for life, and a doctor and a nun and I just stood there and watched … There was nothing to do but watch him die. Baring his sharp toothless gums he clenched his fists against the attack of death. This tiny baby fought for his only possession, life, as if it might be worth something.