Speech of the Hazkarah 2018 by Hélène Mouchard-Zay

 " My emotion is great to speak before you, here, this morning, -first because of the exceptional nature of this ceremony, a moment of recollection and introspection, then because the personalities who did it before me are immense, by their action, by their writings, by their reflection, and that I hardly feel legitimate to register in this succession.

However, I agreed to do it – and I still wonder how I could have had such courage-, perhaps because when you did me the honor, Mr. President, of asking me to intervene, you mentioned (I quote): "[your] personal and family history as well as [your] decisive commitment in favor of Cercil and its development."

Presenting this ceremony, you also say that it is, for the guest speakers, "an opportunity to talk about their relationship and their personal apprehension of this heavy and difficult drama that is the Shoah."

No doubt I then said to myself that, beyond all the objections of illegitimacy that I could oppose, it would be an opportunity for me to clarify a question I have sometimes been asked: why this commitment, which has indeed occupied part of my life?  How did the memory of the Shoah and the paternal memory, at a certain moment, intertwine and intertwine, until they became inseparable and indispensable to each other? ...

I will start with the story of a photo, the photo of a little girl who poses wisely in front of the lens, dressed carefully for this exceptional circumstance, with her curls, her collar Claudine; at her side is her doll, in the shadow. She sets the goal seriously.

This photo, I received it in the mail, a long time ago, in March 1992. We were then a few, a handful, working on the first exhibition ever made on the history of the camps in Loiret: the Cercil had just been created, under circumstances that I will recall later.   We came out of a forgetful time when the history of these French camps was largely absent from local and national memory: only Serge Klarsfeld, in his works, recalled their history, which he himself called "the paroxysm of the final solution in France". An annual pilgrimage, in the month of May, organized by the Association of former Jewish deportees of France, brought together survivors and families, engulfed in pain and remembrance.

On the back of the photo, it read:

“December 31, 1941, to my dear dad, your little Aline.”

It was accompanied by a letter from this little girl’s half-brother, who told her brief story.

Very brief history indeed:

Her name was Aline Korenbajzer. Her parents, Abraham and Emma, Polish Jews refugees in France since 1926, had married in Paris. The little girl, therefore French, was born on August 31, 1939, the day before the declaration of war.

Abraham is arrested on May 14, 1941, during the so-called Billet Vert roundup, and interned in the camp of Pithiviers: that’s where the photo reaches him, sent from Paris by Emma. In May 1942, he managed to escape and went to the ZNO to avoid prosecution. Emma and little Aline, who stayed in Paris, were arrested during the roundup of the Vel’ d'Hiv', interned in Beaune-la-Rolande in the appalling conditions we know, deported at the end of August 1942. Aline is murdered in Auschwitz on August 31, 1942, the anniversary of her three years.

Moving photo, by the intense presence of this little girl, by the enigma of her gaze that plunges into the innermost part of each one, by the gravity that emanates from her face and because one guesses tragedy in it, as if she foresaw the martyrdom to come. And also because this little girl embodies, in her short history, that of the camps of Loiret.

Is it necessary to recall this story: you know it ...

The story of these thousands of men, all foreign Jews, who were summoned on May 14, 1941 for "situation examination" – this convocation is a trap-and then interned in the camps of Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, under the decree signed by Pétain on October 4, 1940, who authorized the internment of foreign Jews.

These men, many of whom had committed themselves to the declaration of war in defense of the country that had welcomed them, are convinced that they will be released quickly. That was not the case. A long internment will upset their lives and those of their families, now alone in the face of the persecutions that hit them daily throughout this year 1941-1942.

Aline’s father, Abraham, was one of those men...

And then it was the Vel’ d'Hiv” roundup: thousands of women and children would tragically find themselves interned in the very places where they had come a few months earlier to visit their husband, father, brother. The conditions of internment are appalling: everything is missing, food, bedding, clothing, medicines; children die, which are buried in the cemetery in Beaune-la-Rolande, in the mass grave in Pithiviers.

But the worst is to come: at the end of July 1942, as Vichy cannot satisfy the Nazi requirements accepted during the Oberg-Bousquet agreements, it is decided to fill the wagons provided for in this program with the people interned in both camps. But since the Nazis do not claim children yet, we only take adults and older teenagers. So it is necessary to sort...

Heartbreaking separation scenes, of extraordinary cruelty ...

Four convoys leave at the end of July – the beginning of August. The children remain alone, in a state of absolute distress. From August 13, it will be their turn. None of the children deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau will return.

Aline was one of those children.

With immediate evidence, this little girl became for us emblematic of thousands of martyred children in the Vel’ d'Hiv’, then in the camps of Loiret, then at Auschwitz. She was certainly only one among the thousands of other children who experienced the same fate, but she was also, at the same time, all these murdered children.

From our 1^era exhibition, it was at the heart of our images: it is she who appeared on the poster created at the time by Joëlle Carreau-Labiche, a poster that spoke so well of the broken destiny of this little girl.

The inauguration in 1992 of this exhibition by Simone Veil, already present alongside the very young Cercil who had just created himself, was an event: "Le Loiret retrouve la mémoire des camps," headlined the local newspaper La Une la République du Centre.

It was indeed an event: the reality of these French camps was then poorly known, as well as, more generally, as we know, that of the deportation of the Jews from France and collaboration.

The population of the communes concerned was not necessarily ready to see a memory resurface, certainly always present in a certain way, but which a diffuse feeling of guilt buried in the unsaid.

There were tensions, tensions: why stir up all this past? Why reopen wounds so recently and so poorly closed?

Nothing went without saying, everything was to be conquered: it was necessary to explain, convince...

For more than 15 years, the small team of the Cercil worked «outside the walls», in archives and in schools, looking for documents and testimonies that could shed light on this history then little studied, publishing testimonies hitherto unknown.

Then little by little, an obvious became evident: there was a need for a place in the city where to anchor this memory, a place where the very stones would be the guardians, dark and obstinate, of this terrible story.

An association can disappear, with those who carried it out, but more difficult a museum.

It was the beginning of a long research. There again, it was necessary to convince, it was necessary to confront different skepticism. But obstinacy made it possible to find the necessary help to create the museum that we inaugurated on January 27, 2011: the successive mayors of Orléans, Jean-Pierre Sueur and Serge Grouard, the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah, without which nothing could have been done, the Region, the ministries, have provided their moral and financial support. The major associations, the Association of Former Deported Jews of France with Henri Bulawko and then the Union of Auschwitz Deportees with Raphael Esrail, the Sons and Daughters of the Jewish Deportees of France with Serge Klarsfeld, as well as the teams from the Shoah Memorial, brought us their support, their expertise, their testimony.  And of course, always the attentive presence of Simone Veil.

During all these years, little Aline accompanied us, present on all our documents, sometimes barely visible, but always there, as if we needed her strength constantly but also her fragility, that thoughtful gaze whose enigma we would never manage to penetrate, of this call he was making to us.

It is now at the heart of our museum, a kind of lookout that can be seen from afar when one arrives at Cercil and which watches over memory, on behalf of all the murdered children.

The last stage of this long march is the recent rapprochement between the Memorial and this great institution where we are today, the Shoah Memorial. A joint work committed for a long time – the CDJC was a founding member of the Cercil in 1991-, and a proximity that has deepened over the years, invited us to it.   Le Cercil is proud to have joined this great institution, which will accompany its development. We will now lead together this difficult and demanding fight of memory.

Indeed, the nagging question remains: how to ensure the survival of the memory of the Shoah and that of the institutions that bear it, a memory whose history shows that it has been so difficult for our country and which will always be threatened by those who only think about erasing it. Certainly, since the 80s, the path traveled has been enormous: historians have worked, teachers are doing extraordinary work in the classes, artists (writers, painters, filmmakers) each in their own way addressed the Shoah. The Second World War seems omnipresent in the media, through many shows, films...

And yet... what do we see?

In a Europe whose memory one might think would protect it against such abuses, we notice the impressive progression of far-right ideas, the rise of nationalism and populism, the desire to exclude or even reject certain populations, the indifference to the misfortunes suffered by others, the powerlessness to solve problems that we know, however, if they remain unsolved, they risk causing the worst. Fear seems to dominate our societies, leading to withdrawal into oneself, distrust of the other, forgetting the third term of our republican motto: fraternity.

The photo of the body of a little boy washed up on a beach, the images of populations sometimes threatened in their very survival, the processions of refugees fleeing war and persecution, and so many other events that should nevertheless awaken the memory of the Europeans that we are (will I mention here the Evian conference of 1938, when the world refused to welcome the Jews who were fleeing persecution?), these images arouse general emotion and indignation for a few days, then are forgotten, chased away by others ...

News that gets carried away, amplified by media which often offer hardly any means of understanding it, the extreme fragility and volatility of opinions, sometimes ready to believe the wildest rumors, and deaf to any attempt at a somewhat complex reflection, blind to increasingly worrying signals, in particular the return of an anti-Semitism that we thought would never see again.

And then, terrible, the feeling of powerlessness that we feel in the face of the development of events that evoke grim memories –even if situations are very different – ; the impression of having no control over developments that we know may be fatal.

Did we learn nothing, understand nothing, retain nothing?

Although indispensable, knowledge of history is not enough, nor are commemorations, however moving they may be: because emotion can disappear as quickly as it came. There is no vaccine against fatal recurrences. Only education, which patiently learns to think for oneself, to deconstruct stereotypes, to analyze complex situations in order to escape manipulation, only education can protect against future disasters. It is necessary to educate, patiently, obstinately, in order to give young people the intellectual weapons to resist all attempts at recruitment, to help them acquire moral strength to resist the temptations of selfishness, indifference, cowardly relief from resignations, small or big.

For this, we need resource places – because we cannot ask everything from the National Education – where long-term work with teachers and more generally with educational actors can be undertaken. (I include the animators, educators and all the adults who are in contact with the young people).

These places, we must, we will have to defend them, by joining forces.

I was sometimes asked about the reasons for my involvement in this adventure: the question surprised me, because it was obvious to me, which did not have to be explained.

Why did you dedicate so many years to this fight of memory, sometimes privileging it over others, also important?

The obvious became evident to me as soon as I had full knowledge of this absolute crime perpetrated a few kilometers from the city where I had been living for years, without ever having heard about it either in high school or elsewhere, me who however belonged to a family particularly sensitive to these questions.

In 1990, recently elected to the Orléans City Council, I learned that a "Museum of Resistance and Deportation" (as it was called) would open somewhere in the Loiret, and that this new museum would only marginally evoke the history of these camps ...

To those who protested, it was then replied: "the Jews did not suffer more than others."

And then, the same year, an event that was, for me like for many, a shock: the news of the desecration of the Jewish cemetery of Carpentras, which aroused immense emotion, and the enormous demonstration that followed, headed by the president of the Republic  (I cannot help but mention at this moment, in a terrible contrast, the lack of reaction after the murders of Ozar Hatorah’s children, in 2012 in Toulouse).

Then settled in me an obsession that was not going to let go of me anymore and that still haunts me: it was necessary to do everything so that these murdered Jewish children did not disappear from the collective memory. And first of all, it was necessary, so that they were not just names scrolling on lists, to give them a face, a name, a story, sometimes a voice when it had been possible for them to write.

At the same time, it was of course necessary to delve deeper into history in order to analyze the process that had led to such events: these, it must be said, were neither an accident unrelated to the past, nor a parenthesis from history without consequences for the future.

But also, – and without having really been aware of it at the time – there was, deep in my memory, the story of another little girl, and undoubtedly the memory of another photo, taken in 1941: that of a baby in a landau driven by a young woman who holds the hand of another little girl a little older, and who comes out of a prison. The baby is me, the other little girl is my sister Catherine, the woman is my mother who comes from the prison of Riom where our father, Jean Zay, is confined. This father, I only knew him in prison, he will not leave until June 20, 1944, to be assassinated by militiamen.

I only measured much later the intensity of what then resonated within me, between the story of little Aline and my own story, between the photo I have been talking about for a while now, and that other photo I just mentioned.

First and foremost, in both cases, the same murderous anti-Semitism and the violence of these assassinations – even if the circumstances were different -, both logical consequences of an anti-Semitism that reached, thanks to war then collaboration, its supreme expression and its radical implementation.

Because it is indeed antisemitism that killed my father, an antisemitism of long French tradition, which certainly had not waited for Hitler to express itself, but which found, thanks to the regime that settled in favor of defeat – the 'divine surprise' of which Maurras speaks -,  the unexpected opportunity to radically satiate this deadly hatred.

"Mandel and Jean Zay are the only politicians to whom Vichy has made their lives pay for having embodied the republican tradition and resistance to Hitler" writes Antoine Prost.

It turns out that both of them had long been central targets of antisemitism.

These attacks of unprecedented violence began as soon as he entered public life. One reads for example in a leaflet distributed during the legislative campaign of 1932, in Orléans:

" ... The city of Joan of Arc, O supreme shame, O infamy, O inconceivable decay, will it suffer the opprobrium of a JEWISH deputy?"

(Which is not without recalling the famous sentence pronounced in the Chamber of Deputies by Xavier Vallat, on June 6, 1936, during the inauguration of the Blum government – and this despite the warning from President Herriot – :

«For the 1^era times this old Gallo-Roman country will be governed by ... a Jew

This antisemitic campaign doubled when Jean Zay became minister of the Popular Front. Two examples, among many others:

Céline, in the School of Corpses, 1938: "You probably know that under the patronage of the Jewish writer Jean Zay, the Sorbonne is no more than a ghetto... I you Zay'.

Lucien Rebatet, in L'Action Française, the same year (22 April 1938):

"I am one of those who will never admit to see the name of a Jew such as Zay and the name of France so indecently joined together"

Certainly other reasons were added to this tenacious hatred: the positions he took, from 1933 for the strongest resistance against the Nazi regime, in 1936 for the aid to the Spanish republicans, in 1938 against the Munich agreements – but also his fight as a minister for republican values, only amplified hatred that was both political and anti-Semitic, feeding one another.

Of a Jewish father, a Protestant mother, a Freemason, an anti-Soviet, republican and secular, he cumulated what Maurras called the «four confederate states, Jews, Protestants, Masons, Métecs», which according to him threatened what he called «the real country», the only legitimate one in his eyes, the one of work, family, parish, homeland.

Jean Zay did not fit the religious definition of Jewishness, nor even, – ironically! –   to that of the status of the Jews (he only had two Jewish grandparents...).   And yet he was all his life "regarded as a Jew" (I expressly repeat the very terms of the status of the Jews), and even, with Léon Blum, as the emblematic Jew of the Popular Front, by anti-Semites convinced that there exists a "Jewish race", regardless of any religion or culture.

Thus we read in 1937 in the Journal of Loiret. "Whether Jean Zay is a Christian, a Buddhist, a Muslim or an Israelite, we don’t care: he is a Jew, therefore 'foreign' to our race, and enemy of our traditions."

Of course, he has "always had the honor to contradict nothing on such a subject," as he writes in Memories and Solitude, his diary written in prison.

And then, in the collective memory of these two stories, there was the same denial of Vichy’s criminal responsibility.

On the plates affixed from 1946 on the location of the camps in Loiret, it could be read:

«Here were interned by the Hitlerian occupants on May 14, 1941, several thousand Jews, subsequently deported to Germany, where the majority died»

No mention of Vichy, who nevertheless managed the camps after having carried out the arrests, nor of the round-up of the Vel’ d'Hiv' which was the implementation in France of the 'final solution', with the complicity of Vichy. Double denial therefore, of the French responsibility and of the reality of the deportation of the Jews from France: let us add that of the specificity of the extermination camps which, as we know, were all in Poland

On the plates in memory of Jean Zay which were affixed in different places, it was indicated that he had been a victim "of Nazi barbarity", or else "of the accomplices of the enemy", or else "of the enemies of France".

No mention either of the responsibility of Vichy or of the reality of this assassination.

And yet, this responsibility was total:

In June 1940, while with others, and in particular Pierre Mendès France, he embarked on the Massilia to continue the struggle in North Africa, Vichy accuses them of "desertion". On October 4, 1940, the Military Tribunal of Clermont-Ferrand, the same one that just sentenced de Gaulle to death for the same reason, condemned my father, on order, to "deportation in perpetuity and military degradation" – the same sentence, word for word, that which was inflicted on Dreyfus -.

In the evening, to a journalist who is surprised by this verdict, the President of the Tribunal replies: "You forget that this boy is part of those bad French people coming from masonry, the Popular Front and Jewry."

While he is in prison, the collaborationist newspapers continue to attack him, accusing him, like the members of the hated Popular Front, both of having wanted war (the 'war of the Jews', as they said), of not having prepared it and of having lost it...

On June 20, 1944, he was assassinated by order of Darnand, head of the militia, then minister of Pétain. The militiamen in charge of this low task dynamite his body, in order to leave no trace.

For four years, no one will know what has become of him. His remains will only be found and identified in 1948, following the confession of one of the militia assassins.

Four years without burial...

For four years, little girl, I knew nothing about my missing father, like the thousands of children who knew nothing about what had happened to their missing loved ones whose memory we honor today, and who have long lived in the conviction that one day they would return.

In 1945, my mother wrote a long letter to the President of the court who was then judging Pétain, asking for justice "in the name of this death without a grave where to mourn him". She ends like this:

The time has come for the marshal to give reason to the responsibilities he once boasted with an imperious pride.

As we know, in 1945, the time had not come. No more than for the recognition of his responsibility in the deportation of the Jews of France, which will only intervene in 1995, with the speech of Jacques Chirac.

Certainly, the difference between the two situations, one extreme and the other, was great: on the one hand a little girl born into a family of Polish Jews who had taken refuge in France, enrolled in the strong religious and cultural tradition of the Jews of Eastern Europe, caught in the turmoil of exile and collective anti-Jewish persecutions that were unleashed during Hitler’s rise to power. Refugees in our country, these foreign Jews had found asylum. But they were betrayed by Vichy who delivered them to the Nazis, claiming that thus he protected the French Jews, which is, as we know, a lie. A little girl then, who had done nothing but to be born into a Jewish and foreign family (because one should not underestimate the xenophobic dimension of anti-Semitism at the time).
On the other side, a politician, born to his father from a very old Jewish Alsatian family, ' of these strong and ancient communities from the East rooted in the Republic, these Jews of France who assume from the beginning the emancipatory project of the Revolution as written by Pierre Girard. Because, like many, they wanted to stay French, my great-grandparents had left annexed Alsace in 1871. These "Israelites", as they were called, were integrated into French society to the point of sometimes being almost invisible there as Jews, which made them all the more dangerous for anti-Semites, haunted by the phantasmatic representation of the Jew who hides and pulls the strings.

It is in this environment, the Republic Madmen as they are called by Pierre Birnbaum, that my grandfather grew up. Faithful to this heritage and the humanist values that he upheld, he committed himself very early in the fight for Dreyfus, founding a newspaper in Orleans in 1898.

I would like here to recall the magnificent words of Simone Veil, which resounded on the day of her entry into the Pantheon:

"From my father, I especially remembered that his belonging to Jewry was linked to the knowledge and culture that the Jews acquired over the centuries in times when very few had access to it. They had remained the people of the Book, whatever the persecutions, the misery and the wandering.

For my mother, it was more about an attachment to the values for which, throughout their long and tragic history, the Jews had not stopped fighting: tolerance, respect for the rights of each one and all identities, solidarity

Both died in deportation, leaving me for only legacy these humanistic values that for them Judaism embodied.

From this heritage, it is not possible for me to dissociate the ever present memory, even haunting, of the six million Jews exterminated for the sole reason that they were Jewish. Six million of which were my parents, my brother and many of my relatives. I cannot separate from them.

That is enough for my Jewishness to be imprescriptible until my death...

Despite this so long silence of memory, which I experienced as an endless injustice, I have always been convinced that my father would one day have a place in the history books.

But these children, these thousands of murdered children, ...

The unbearable was that they disappeared from the collective memory.

And then, acting for the memory of these murdered children, it was also acting, in a derived but so strong way, for the memory of my father, at a time when dealing directly with this history and this memory was difficult for me.

To finish, I return to the photo of little Aline, because her story is not over...

In 2013, on the walls of an old hut from Beaune-la-Rolande found at a private home, we discover inscriptions drawn with blue pencil. We decipher:

“Korenbajzer Emma Aline, on August 6, 1942 – in remembrance for all who pass by here”.

Amazement... how is this possible?  The only inscription discovered after all these years of research, could it be that it precisely concerns this little girl with whom we have been living for so many years, and who has become the very identity of Cercil? Among the 4,000 children who were locked up in these two camps, it is of her and of her alone that we find a trace, inscribed on the wall of this hut!

Incredulous, we are asking for the expertise of a graphologist, who compares with the few lines written on the back of the photo, and confirms that it is indeed Emma’s handwriting.

Incredible discovery, overwhelming...

Finally, a few months ago, new testimonies arrive to us, just as overwhelming:

That of Emma’s sister, Fanny, who tells us that on the day of the Vel’ d'Hiv' roundup, she suggests to Emma to entrust the little girl to her (being a prisoner of war’s wife, she was not threatened). But Emma thinks it’s just a control and especially that Aline is much too young to be arrested. She refuses to separate from her little girl.

Like her, many were at the time those who believed that the unthinkable could not happen in the country that had welcomed them, that it would protect them, that in any case the children would be safe ... Absolute betrayal of this regime that delivered to the Nazis those it should have protected, absolutely.

A letter finally, written from the camp of Beaune-la-Rolande by Emma to her brother Aron:

My dear brother and sister-in-law.

We are talking about sending the children to public assistance, I beg you have mercy on my dear child, claim her and take her with you she will be safe because you are French, and we mothers are talking about sending us to Poland, I certainly won’t survive it but Aline at least will live, don’t refuse me, Aline it’s my only reason to live. Please I beg you, here there are all kinds of diseases that she will get. I am already exhausted, 5 nights that I don’t sleep so much I think about Aline. My yellow face makes everyone feel sorry, but they can do nothing because they have no order. Aron and Bella darling you love her, protect her like a mom because you have children and you understand what it is for a mother. If she goes to public assistance, she will die and this thought drives me crazy. She sleeps on wood on the ground, in the morning she asks me for a bottle of milk and imagines my pain when I don’t have any. Do something for her, claim her. I can no longer write, I am too weak. I kiss you and my little doll.

Thus, periodically, throughout these 25 years, by the incredible chance of successive discoveries, little Aline has reminded us with strength – if we have ever stopped thinking about her, she who is present everywhere in our museum and always in our memory.

As if she were afraid that our vigilance would weaken.

As if she were sending us signs, whose intensity overwhelms us. I am here, she tells us, with my story, my terrible story. I carry the memory of millions of murdered children, those of the past, but also those of the present, crushed by the hatreds of adults, those whom cowardice, blindness or indifference abandon to their fate, those whom a silent accomplice completes to condemn. Because I also have the face of little Myriam, of Arieh and Gabriel, murdered in Toulouse in 2012, of little Alyan, who drowned on a Mediterranean beach, of little Alan who is brought out dazed from the rubble of his house in Syria, of "the black child cut alive in two by the machete of an ethnic executioner", evoked here by Robert Badinter in 2010, and by so many others...   The face of all those whose photo, which tells their unbearable misfortune, certainly moves the world one day, then is forgotten the next. The face of all those children whom collectively we did not know how to protect.

So, all of us who are gathered here this morning, we who could never have imagined that we could once again, in France, murder Jewish children and who are desperate for it, what can we tell her, to this little girl so alive, if not that we are there, we are still there, we will always be there, as long as we have the strength.”