Researching and Remembering the Jews

A Collaborative List, 2011-12

 In the summer of 2011, I was invited to participate in an informal research and discussion group focused on the Jews of the Somme, especially those who were deported during the Occupation.  The group was convened by Cécile Marseille, a member of the Amiens City Council, and Gisèle Cozette, President of the local chapter of the Association of Deportees, Internees, Resistance members, and Patriots (ADIRP).  Cécile had succeeded in getting a plaque erected in the rue Octave Tierce near the Citadel of Amiens commemorating the Roundup (Rafle) of the city’s Jews on January 4, 1944. She invited Ginette Hirtz (Schulhof), author of a brilliant memoir of her family during the Occupation and whose parents, grandmother and adopted half brother had been deported to Auschwitz, to offer remarks alongside Mayor Gilles Demailly at the dedication of the plaque on May 8, 2011. An issue of the newsletter Amiens Memoire that Cécile edited reported on the event. 

I met Gisèle Cozette at the local commemoration of the Vel d’Hiv roundup in Paris at the Martyrs’ Monument in the Place René Goblet. She too had taken an interest in the Jewish deportees of the Somme, and had resources in the ADIRP Archives shedding light on some of their fates, including an important manuscript list of deportees drawn up in 1947 by a former President of the Jewish Community, Lucien Aaron.  Gisèle made these records available to the research team and otherwise lent her support.

At the Hotel de Ville, during the first meeting of the group, I made the acquaintance of several active researchers, including Frédéric Gazet, Claude Leleu, and Claude Watteel. Watteel, a retired history teacher from the lycée Sainte-Famille in Amiens, was engaged in researching the history and bringing into public view the tragic fate of Cécile Redlich, a teenage martyr of the 1944 Rafle. His research led in time to the work “From Amiens to Auschwitz: the fate of the Redlich family” and he also later succeeded in getting the city to agree to name a street near the new Amiens synagogue in her memory.

Frédéric Gazet was an actively employed history teacher at a lycée in Corbie.  He had been in contact with Ginette Schulhof for a number of years and had organized an exhibit on the Shoah in the Somme for his students. By the time we met in 2011 Frédéric had probed many sources including those at the Center for Documentation at the Memorial of the Shoah in Paris. When it turned out that the original plaque for the rafle needed some correction, his research supplied the accurate information.

The meeting was additionally important in introducing me to Dr. Guy Zarka, the President of the Jewish Congregation of the Somme, the A.C.I.S.  Dr. Zarka invited me to have Shabbat dinner at his home and made available to the Departmental Archives historical records of the Synagogue Association. We later teamed with Cécile Marseille to create a non-profit Association “Jewish Presence in the Somme” which in time provided the impetus for several important initiatives, including the creation of a memorial plaque at the site of the former World War II-era synagogue.

As things turned out, the main product of the informal research group was the production of a list of Jews of the Somme with special attention to deportees. 

The list circulated within the group and was constructed chiefly by Frédéric Gazet and Claude Leleu with the latter taking charge of updates. In our meetings we sometimes debated the right spelling of names and whether one date or another for a person’s birth or one address or another was correct. Even when the list was somewhat finalized in 2012, it was acknowledged that it would not be complete or free from errors. Indeed many new names have turned up since then, and corrections are needed, but fearing the loss of much valuable information and some suggestive leads, I decided recently to consult Claude and Frédéric about the possibility of placing the list on the jewsofthesomme website and they kindly offered their accord. 

Looking back on this effort, I can see that the structure of the list perhaps owed something to the template provided by Françoise Leclère-Rosenzweig’s compact study of the Persecutions of the Jews of the Oise (2012). The list, like Professor Leclère-Rosenzweig’s book, not only contains information about Jewish deportees and some of their family members and other Jews who were not deported. It also includes information on “Hidden Children” and “Righteous Gentiles” (whom the French call “les Justes”) and whose courageous actions helped save Jewish lives. 

Following the link to the list, I am appending a bibliography of studies and reportage on local historical and commemorative initiatives. This is in addition to those found on the Project Coverage page, which should also be consulted.

2012-2013

The project continued to take shape in these years, partly under the banner of the newly founded Association Presence Juive dans la Somme.  The creation of a plaque or, perhaps, a memorial sculpture at the site of the now vanished World War II era synagogue remained a goal, but funding and permitting issues seemed problematic. If, however, a physical memorial could not be immediately attained perhaps a virtual one could?  We had already begun to explore with the Director of the Departmental Archives of the Somme Olivier de Solan, the prospect of putting more Jewish related content on the website of the Archives. A search for  “Juifs” (“Jews”) on the site brought few results. Dr. Zarka agreed to make available to the archives for scanning some of the historical documentation of the synagogue association (l’Association Cultuelle Israelite de la Somme or ACIS).  Olivier de Solan encouraged us to propose other materials already in the Departmental Archives or in other repositories or private collections to fill out the picture of the Department’s Jewish history. During the summer of 2012, I met with Olivier and Ludovic Klawinski, in charge of the imaging division of the archives, to discuss the project. Our  collaboration continued during the year by email.  [Photo of Ludovic and Olivier.]

One difficulty that emerged in the course of this otherwise productive project was the inability of the Archives to publish name lists (listes nominatives) on their site. The post-war regulations protecting privacy and more recent legislation regarding internet use by public agencies created barriers to the presentation of what seemed to me the crucial name lists created by the authorities at the beginning of the Occupation.  How could one begin to define the nature of the Shoah on the local level without discussing concrete Jews in their humanity and individuality ? The website now indicated the existence of such lists and the availability of scans of the lists on the terminals in the reading room of the Archives, but the lists themselves were not available outside the Archives.

Notwithstanding these limitations, we held a public launch of the new archives feature, an event covered in the Courier Picard and Vivre en Somme. Also, a fortuitous meeting with Mme Louise Dessaivre, a descendant of Ferdinand and Berthe Lazard, who were victims of the January 4, 1944 roundup in the Somme, led to new materials and an important friendship.

The niece of a British Jewish officer contacted Guy with the offer of a series of letters, some of which contained poignant details of the restoration of services in the post-Liberation synagogue.  Claude Watteel on the Redlich family and Edith Fuchs (Affenkraut) contributed unique materials to be scanned. Ginette Schulhof (Hirtz), author of  Les Hortillonnages sous la Grele,  met with Guy and Olivier de Solan and offered precious materials from her family.  In such ways aspects of the Jewish fate in the Somme were able to be brought, via the Departmental Archives website, before audiences not previously aware of them.

Sitting at the dining room table of my friends Pierre and Gaëtane Giraud in Amiens one evening, I was surprised to receive a phone call from home telling me I had been named by a letter from the French Minister of Culture and Communication a “Knight in the Order of Arts and Letters” for my contribution to French archives and history. This honor I took to be based on the work I was doing on the memory of the Jews as well as on previous work on the history of the Protestant movement in Amiens.

2014

A major documentary discovery

Pursuing a project on the Jews of Amiens and the Department of the Somme

My wife pointed out that at the very end of our trips to France, which were partly vacation, partly research trips for me, I always contrived to find some historical sources, which absolutely required us to return the following year.  For example, in 2013 when I was researching the emigration of Amiens protestants to Leiden in Holland in the seventeenth century, we traveled to that Dutch city for several days, but only long enough for me to establish how much more there was in the archives that cried out for another, longer visit.

A few years ago, when my focus shifted to the subject of the fate of the Jews of the Somme region during the Shoah, this quasi-subterfuge continued. My wife had returned to Pittsburgh the first week in August to prepare for the new school year, but I, a retiree, was permitted to stay on for several more weeks in France to explore, in the not disagreeable circumstances of an American in France, what more the archives might yield for my subject.

For the first week I was there they didn’t yield much.  I dawdled a bit in the public library where I perused the local newspapers (Progrès de la Somme, Journal d’Amiens) for the period of the Occupation duly noting their pro-German slant. The departmental archives were closed from August 1 until after Quinze Aout (August 15th) a French national holiday.  It was, however, exactly during this hiatus that the metaphorical lightning struck.

 I don’t know what directed me, sitting at my computer in my apartment in Amiens, toward a YouTube of a panel discussion, which had been held at the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris?  One of the panelists, Mme Caroline Piketty, was describing a project undertaken by the French National Archives, to film the records of the Office for Economic Aryanization, a branch of the Vichy government that was charged with enforcing the removal of all Jewish influence from the economic life of France. I already knew something about this sad process from documents I had seen in the departmental and municipal archives in Amiens, but Mme Piketty described her source “Series AJ 38” in a way that hinted at a trove of material far surpassing anything I had previously seen. 

 When the National Archives reopened after the 15th of August, I commuted into Paris and spent three amazing days confirming Mme Piketty’s observations.  Not only was there an abundance of information on each of the owners and properties that were transferred into “Aryan” hands, there were a number of other documents I had not found anywhere else.  The most startling were letters of individual Jews addressed to the French government authorities and describing generally the difficulties into which they had fallen as the heavy hand of anti-Jewish laws was progressively put in place. Here, too, dishearteningly, were images of registers which Jewish heads of households were obliged to sign attesting that they had received their allotment of Yellow Stars for themselves and their families; here was an anonymous denunciation of a Jewish country doctor who the writer thought should have been compelled to cease his practice; here was a report filed by two French policemen concerning their arrest of a foreign born Jew whom they had subsequently accompanied by train to the camp for the Jews at Drancy, where he was later shipped to Auschwitz.   Surprises abounded as the images of the microfilmed documents unfolded:  here were the names and backgrounds of the people who acquired Jewish-owned properties; here in fact were the names of all of the bidders!  No one could claim ignorance – the documents showed that the properties were advertised in the local newspapers “Israelite building for sale” and the buyers had to submit elaborate documentation and family trees to prove that no trace of Jewish blood coursed through their veins.

 I learned something else from this brief exposure to Series AJ 38.  I learned that after the big roundup in Paris (perhaps familiar to readers through the book and movie Sarah’s Key) there had been a roundup albeit much smaller in the region I was studying, on July 18-19, 1942.  The documents showed this to have been coordinated carefully to single out foreign-born, not French Jews, and executed in a way so as not “to alarm the Jews remaining.”  Of course, in January 1944, it was the turn in the Somme region of French and naturalized French Jews to be arrested, sent to Drancy and deported to Auschwitz.

Back home in Pittsburgh at the end of August, I felt I could hardly wait for a return trip, but, among other things, there was the expense to consider.  Mr. Olivier de Solan, Director of the Departmental Archives in Amiens, suggested I look into the cost of reproducing the microfilm and having it sent to me.  I did so and after an interval of several months, a box of twenty microfilm reels arrived on my doorstep in Mt. Lebanon. This shipment and the availability of a microfilm reader and printer in the Mt. Lebanon library are enabling me to expand my research and are opening up new avenues to make my discoveries better known, especially on the ground in France.   [End of Part 1]

[This article follows on some previous reportage in the Jewish Chronicle by David Rosenberg (“Memorializing in Amiens” May 3, 2012) and Toby Tabachnik, (“Rosenberg to Speak at TE on Research work in Amiens,” August 16, 2013)]

I am grateful to the Jewish Chronicle of Pittsburgh for publishing this text on Nov. 5, 2015 under the title "Pursuing a project on the Jews of Amiens and the Department of the Somme."

2017

At last the faces of the Jews and a plaque for the WW II-era synagogue

Shining Light on France’s Forgotten Shoah History By David L. Rosenberg

This year, there were two notable developments in my project to concretize the historical reality of the Shoah in a part of France where efforts to memorialize the fate of the Jews had previously been scant. In July, at the Documentation Center of the Memorial of the Shoah in Paris, I discovered a roll of microfilm containing thumbnail portraits of 42 Jews from Amiens and the department of the Somme. The photos were taken in 1942 and affixed to government identification cards.

I had been researching these individuals for five years but had never encountered an image of many of them. For the first time I saw the face of Leon Louria, founder and president of the synagogue association, who had been sentenced to two years imprisonment for failing to wear his yellow star in the prescribed fashion.

I saw the visages of the Polish-born Jews Sara Lewenberg and her husband Abraham, a barber. He had been arrested and deported in July 1942. At the time, a merciful doctor certified Sara Lewenberg’s need for medical care, but the authorities waited for her release from the hospital in Amiens, and she was taken to Drancy by train under armed police escort in October.

I discovered a picture of the young Ginette Schulhof, 19 at the time of the photo, about the moment she had braved retribution by publically sketching the façade of the Amiens synagogue. On Jan. 4, 1944, when her family was decimated, she was fortunate to escape with her younger sister and brother over the rooftops of Amiens. I first met her in 2012 and was privileged to know her for the few years before her death in 2015.

A second development of significance occurred this summer. I learned from Dr. Guy Zarka, current head of the Amiens Jewish community, that the city of Amiens had agreed to our proposal that a commemorative plaque be erected at the site of the World War II synagogue. This building at 12 Rue du Cloître de la Barge had served the Jewish community of Amiens beginning in 1935, but had been razed in 1969 as part of a development project. The synagogue was the product of a growing community, many of whose participants came to Amiens from other parts of France or other countries. The synagogue had been despoiled during the Occupation, though services were restored in the fall of 1944 following the liberation of the city by British and American troops.

Mayor Brigitte Foure and the city of Amiens had agreed to unveil the plaque on the same day, Oct. 22, 2017, as a new synagogue, the third in the series, was being inaugurated at another location. Having been instrumental in proposing the plaque for the synagogue and researching its history, I wanted to be present at the unveiling. Friends at the local historical society — the Society of Antiquaries of Picardy — decided to organize a symposium on religious buildings in Amiens in the 20th century, and invited me to give a presentation on the history of the war-era synagogue the day before the unveiling. This seemed an excellent opportunity to contextualize the event. The Courier Picard, the regional newspaper, published a prominent article, which called attention to the upcoming symposium and explained its connection to the unveiling of the plaque.

On Sunday, Oct. 22, I stood alongside the mayor, the prefect of the Somme and Mme. Sophie-Laure Zana, a colleague who had proposed the language for the plaque, to offer remarks at the unveiling. In my comments, I explained how the existence and location of the old synagogue had come as a surprise to me and other researchers when we learned about it in 2011. We hoped that a plaque marking the emplacement of the synagogue, in the center of the city, would recall and inspire interest in the history of the building and the fate of the people for whom it was a focus of life and learning.

The plaque, in bronze raised letters at the end of a newly painted section of wall, reads, under a star of David: “At number 12 of rue Cloitre de la Barge stood the first synagogue of Amiens, inaugurated in 1935 by Jean Moulin, despoiled and desecrated between 1940 and 1944. To the memory of the Jews of France, rounded up and deported between 1942 and 1944, assassinated at Auschwitz because they were born Jews.

“Let us never forget them.”

I am grateful to the Jewish Chronicle of Pittsburgh for publishing this text on November 30, 2017 under the title "Shining Light on France's forgotten Shoah history in Amiens.