Hazkarah 2018 speech 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 have done it before me are immense, by their actions, by their writings, by their reflection, and that I feel hardly legitimate to be part of this succession.

However, I agreed to do it – and I still wonder how I could have such recklessness-,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 to 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 thought that, beyond all the objections of illegitimacy that I could raise, this 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 cross and intertwine at a certain point, until they became inseparable and indispensable to each other? ...

I will begin with the story of a photo, the photo of a little girl who poses wisely in front of the camera, 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 severely.

This photo, I received it in the mail a long time ago, in March 1992. At that time, a handful of us were working on the first exhibition ever made on the history of the camps in the Loiret: the Cercil had just been created, under circumstances which I will recall shortly.   We were emerging from a forgotten era when the history of these French camps was largely absent from local and national memory: only Serge Klarsfeld, in his work, recalled the history, which he himself called "the paroxysm of the final solution in France". An annual pilgrimage in 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 father, 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 who had taken refuge in France since 1926, were married in Paris. The little girl, therefore French, was born on August 31, 1939, the day before the declaration of war.

Abraham was arrested on 14 May 1941, during the so-called Billet Vert roundup, and interned in the Pithiviers camp: that’s when he received the photo, 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 had remained in Paris, were arrested during the roundup of the Vel’ d'Hiv', interned in Beaune-la-Rolande under the appalling conditions we know, deported at the end of August 1942. Aline was murdered at Auschwitz on 31 August 1942, the anniversary of her third birthday.

Shocking photo, by the intense presence of this little girl, by the enigma of her gaze that plunges into everyone’s innermost being, by the gravity that emanates from her face and because one can sense tragedy in it, as if she foresaw the martyrdom to come. And also because this girl embodies, in her short history, that of the camps in Loiret.

Need we remind you of this story: do you know it...

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

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

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

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

But the worst is yet to come: at the end of July 1942, as Vichy was unable to meet the Nazi demands accepted during the Oberg-Bousquet agreements, it was decided to fill the wagons provided for in this program with those interned on both sides. But since the Nazis don’t claim children yet, we only take adults and older teenagers. So we have to sort things out...

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 has become emblematic for us of the thousands of children martyred at the Vel’ d'Hiv’, then in the camps of Loiret, and 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 those murdered children.

From our 1st^era exhibition, it was at the heart of our images: it is she who appeared on the poster made at the time by Joëlle Carreau-Labiche, a poster that so well told 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 in Une la République du Centre, the local newspaper.

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

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

There were tensions: why stir up all this past? Why reopen wounds so recently and so badly healed?

Nothing was taken for granted, everything had to be conquered: it had to be explained, convinced...

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

Then, little by little, an evidence was imposed: it was necessary a place in the city where to anchor this memory, a place where the same stones would be the guardians, dark and obstinate, of this terrible history.

An association may disappear, along with those who supported it, but a museum is more difficult.

This was the beginning of a long search. Again, it was necessary to convince, 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: 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 des Anciens Déportés Juifs de France with Henri Bulawko and then the Union des Déportés d'Auschwitz 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, have brought us their support, their expertise, their testimony.  And of course, always the attentive presence of Simone Veil.

During all these years, little Aline has accompanied us, present on all our documents, sometimes barely visible, but always there, as if we constantly needed her strength but also her fragility, that thoughtful gaze whose enigma we would never be able 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 you arrive at the Cercil and which watches over memory, in the name of all the murdered children.

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

Indeed, the question remains haunting: 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 think only of erasing it. Of course, since the 1980s, the road travelled has been enormous: historians have worked, teachers are doing extraordinary work in the classroom, artists (writers, painters, filmmakers) have each approached the Holocaust in their own way. 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 drifts, we see the impressive progression of far-right ideas, the rise of nationalism and populism, the desire to exclude or even reject certain populations, indifference to the misfortunes suffered by others, the inability 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 others, and forgetting the third term in our republican motto: brotherhood.

The photo of the body of a little boy stranded 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 we are (Will I mention here the 1938 Evian conference, when the world refused to welcome Jews fleeing persecution?), these images arouse general emotion and indignation for a few days, then are forgotten, chased away by others...

News that gets out of hand, amplified by media that often offer little means to understand it, the extreme fragility and volatility of opinions, sometimes willing to believe the wildest rumors, and deaf to any attempt at a slightly complex reflection, blind to increasingly worrying signals, in particular the return of an anti-Semitism that we thought never to 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 the situations are very different – the impression of having no control over developments that we know are likely to be fatal.

Haven’t we learned anything, understood anything, remembered anything?

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

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

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

I was sometimes asked about the reasons for my commitment to this adventure: the question surprised me, because it was obvious to me, and did not need to be explained.

Why have you devoted so many years to this fight for memory, sometimes giving it priority over others that are just as important?

The evidence was obvious to me as soon as I had full knowledge of this absolute crime perpetrated a few kilometers from the city where I had lived for years, without ever having heard about it, either in high school or elsewhere, I, 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 be opening 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 the others."

And then, the same year, an event that was, for me as for many, a shock: the news of the desecration of the Jewish cemetery in Carpentras, which stirred immense emotion, and the enormous demonstration that followed, led 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 would not let go of me any more and still lives in me: we had to do everything so that these murdered Jewish children did not disappear from the collective memory. And first of all, so that they were not just names scrolling on lists, it was necessary to give them back 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 deepen history, in order to analyze the process that had led to such events: these, it must be said, were neither an accident without connection with the past, nor a parenthesis of history without consequences for the future.

But also, – and without my having really been aware of it at the time – there was, deep in my memory, the story of another little girl, and probably the memory of another photo, taken in 1941: that of a baby in a pram, driven by a young woman who gives her hand to another little girl, a bit older, and who has just been released from prison. The baby is me, the other little girl is my sister Catherine, and the woman is my mother who is coming out of Riom prison where our father, Jean Zay, is locked up. This father, I only knew him in prison, he will come out only on June 20, 1944, to be assassinated by militiamen.

Only much later did I measure the intensity of what then resonated within me, between the story of little Aline and my own story, between the photo I’ve been talking about, 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 – are both logical consequences of an anti-Semitism that has reached, thanks to war and then collaboration, its supreme expression and radical implementation.

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

"Mandel and Jean Zay are the only politicians to whom Vichy has paid with their lives for embodying the republican tradition and resistance to Hitler" writes Antoine Prost.

As it happens, both had long been central targets of anti-Semitism.

These attacks of unheard-of violence began as soon as he entered public life. For example, one reads in a leaflet distributed during the 1932 legislative campaign in Orléans:

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

(This is reminiscent of the famous phrase uttered in the Chamber of Deputies by Xavier Vallat on 6 June 1936, during the inauguration of the Blum government – and despite the warning of President Herriot – :

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

This anti-Semitic campaign increased when Jean Zay became minister of the Popular Front. Two examples, among many others:

Céline, in l'École des cadavres, 1938: "You probably know that under the patronage of the Jewish negrote Jean Zay, the Sorbonne is no more than a ghetto... Je vous 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"

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

With a Jewish father, a Protestant mother, a Freemason, an anti-Mondiar, a republican and a secular, he had what Maurras called the "four Confederate States: Jews, Protestants, Masons, Métis", which in his opinion threatened what he called "the real country", the only legitimate one in his eyes, that of work, the family, the parish, the homeland.

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

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

Of course, he has "always had the honor to deny nothing on such a subject," as he writes in Souvenirs et 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 in 1946 to the location of the camps in Loiret, it was written:

"Here were interned by the Hitlerian occupiers on 14 May 1941, several thousand Jews were subsequently deported to Germany, where most of them died"

No mention of Vichy, who nevertheless managed the camps after making the arrests, nor of the Vel’ d'Hiv’ roundup, 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 plaques in memory of Jean Zay that were affixed in various places, it was indicated that he had been a victim of "Nazi barbarism", or "accomplices of the enemy", or "enemies of France".

There is no mention here either of Vichy’s responsibility or of the reality of this assassination.

And yet, this responsibility was total:

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

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

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

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

For four years, no one will know what happened to him. His remains were only found and identified in 1948, following the confession of one of the murderous militiamen.

Four years without burial...

For four years, little girl, I did not know anything about my missing father, like the thousands of children who knew nothing about what had happened to their missing loved ones whose memory we now honor, and who have long lived in the belief that one day they would come back.

In 1945, my mother wrote a long letter to the president of the court that then judged Pétain, asking for justice "in the name of this death without a grave where to mourn him". She ends as follows:

"The time has come for the marshal to settle his mind with the responsibilities he once boasted of with an imperious pride."

As we know, in 1945, the time had not come. Nor for the recognition of his responsibility in the deportation of Jews from France, which will only take place in 1995, with the speech of Jacques Chirac.

Of course, the difference between the two extreme situations, one and the other, was great: on the one hand, a little girl born into a family of Polish Jewish refugees in France, enrolled in the strong religious and cultural tradition of the Jews of Eastern Europe, caught up in the turmoil of exile and anti-Jewish collective persecution that erupted as Hitler came to power. Refugees in our country, these foreign Jews had found asylum. But they were betrayed by Vichy, who handed them over to the Nazis, claiming that in this way he was protecting 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 by his father into a very old Jewish Alsatian family, " of these strong and ancient communities of the East rooted in the Republic, these Jews of France who from the outset assumed the emancipatory project of the Revolution" as written by Pierre Girard. Because, like many others, they wanted to remain French, my great-grandparents had left the 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 fantastical 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 carried, he engaged 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 rang out on the day of her entrance into the Pantheon:

"From my father, I especially remembered that his belonging to Jewishness was linked to the knowledge and culture that the Jews acquired over the centuries in times when they had little access to it. They had remained the people of the Book, regardless of persecution, misery and wandering.

For my mother, it was more a commitment to the values for which, throughout their long and tragic history, the Jews had never ceased to fight: tolerance, respect for the rights of each person and all identities, solidarity

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

Of 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, including my parents, my brother, and many others close to me. I can’t part with them.

This is enough for my Jewishness to be imprescriptible until my death...”

Despite this so long silence of memory, which I have 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 thing 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 powerful way, for the memory of my father, at a time when confronting this story and this memory directly was difficult for me.

Finally, I’m going to go back to the photo of little Aline, because her story isn’t over yet...

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

"Korenbajzer Emma Aline, on 6 August 1942 – in memory of all those who will pass here".

Amazement... how is this possible?  The only inscription discovered after all these years of research, could it be that it concerns precisely 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 only of her that we find a trace, written on the wall of this hut!

In disbelief, we are requesting the expertise of a graphologist, who will compare it with the few lines written on the back of the photo, and confirm that it is indeed Emma’s handwriting.

Incredible discovery, overwhelming...

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

That of Emma’s sister, Fanny, who tells us that on the day of the Vel’ d’Hiv`s roundup, she offers Emma to give her the little girl (being a prisoner of war’s wife, she was not threatened). But Emma thinks it’s just a check and above all that Aline is far too young to be arrested. She refuses to part with her little girl.

Like her, many people at the time 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; please 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 at least Aline 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 catch. I’m already exhausted, I haven’t slept for five nights so much I think about Aline. My yellow face pities everyone, but they can’t do anything, because they have no order. Aron and Bella, dear ones, you love her, protect her like a mother because you have children and you understand what it is like for a mother. If she goes to the public assistance, she will die and this thought drives me crazy. She sleeps on the ground on wood, 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, ask for it. I can’t write anymore, I’m too weak. Kisses to you and my little doll.

So, periodically, throughout these 25 years, by the incredible chance of successive discoveries, little Aline has been forcefully remembered to us – if at all we have ever stopped thinking about her, she who is present everywhere in our museum and still in our memory.

As if she were afraid that our vigilance would weaken.

As if she were sending us signs, the intensity of which is devastating. 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 that cowardice, blindness or indifference abandon to their fate, those that a complicit silence 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 being dragged out of the rubble of his house in Syria, of "the Black child cut alive in two by the machete of an ethnic executioner", mentioned here by Robert Badinter in 2010, and by so many others...   The face of all those whose photo, which recounts their unbearable misfortune, certainly moves the world one day, then is forgotten the next. The faces of all those children that we collectively failed to protect.

So, all of us who are gathered here this morning, we who could never have imagined that it would be possible again, in France, to murder Jewish children and who are desperate for it, what can we tell her, to this little girl who is so alive, except that we are there, we are still there, we will always be there, as long as we have the strength.”