It's been almost seven decades since the end of the
Holocaust, yet revelations about it keep appearing. One is a new book, The
Marcel Network: How One French Couple Saved 527 Children from the Holocaust by Fred Coleman, an award-winning journalist whose
career included stints as Newsweek's
bureau chief in Paris and Moscow.
He for the first time gives a full account of a small but remarkable
part of the resistance to Holocaust deportations from France.
The story centers on two young Jews, Moussa Abadi and Odette
Rodenstock, who met in Paris in 1939.
Moussa, then 30, was an émigré from Syria and a Ph.D. student; Odette, 25,
was a native Parisian and a medical doctor. (They eventually married, both
going by the surname Abadi, so I follow Coleman in using their first names.)
When the Nazis conquered France in June 1940, they set up a
puppet French regime, centered in Vichy, which nominally governed all of France
but had "sovereignty" of a sort only in its south and in France's
colonies—e.g., North Africa. Vichy
collaborated with the Nazis throughout France in persecuting and rounding up
Jews. Still, there were islands of
relative safety in parts of the southeast, including Nice, to which Moussa and
Odette had fled.
The surrender by the Vichy authorities in North Africa to
the Allies in November 1942 augured the soon-to-come Nazi occupation of
southern France and a huge increase in deportations of Jews from the region to
Nazi death camps. Moussa resolved
to save whom he could from that fate—an imperative that led him to form the
clandestine Marcel Network, focused on hiding Jewish children among Christians
in his area.
Moussa found an early ally in the Bishop of Nice, Paul
Rémond. Rémond felt that he had a
duty to God higher than obedience to Pope Pius XII, who shamefully—in the
face of Continent-wide Nazi barbarity—had decreed the silent neutrality of the Church. The bishop worked closely with Moussa,
providing safe havens for Jewish children in convents, church schools and
orphanages, and helping to produce forged identification papers, baptismal
certificates and food-ration documents for them—all under new Catholic
identities that the children had to be arduously trained to assume. (The cover
was often that the children were refugees from vanquished French North Africa,
where original records could no longer be checked by Vichy.) Rémond also issued pseudonymous credentials to
Moussa and Odette, naming them as functionaries of the Church.
Protestant clergymen also became instrumental in the
Network, including Pierre Gagnier, pastor of the Reformed Church of Nice and
Edmond Evrard, pastor of the Nice Baptist Church. They arranged for many of their parishioners to integrate
Jewish children into their families, again with new Christian identities,
usually with the same cover.
All of the members of the Network—Moussa, Odette and
confederates who helped operate it; the many clergymen, priests, nuns and
families who provided hiding places for the children; smugglers who ran funds
into France to support the Network's operations—were ordinary, unarmed
civilians who placed themselves in imminent danger of imprisonment and worse
for their participation. (Odette
was in fact caught in 1944 and spent a year in Auschwitz and then
Bergen-Belsen, surviving only because her skills as a doctor were needed.) Through the brave efforts of such
people, 527 children were saved, all surviving the War. Moussa continued his mission for years
afterward, searching for still-living parents or relatives of the children, or
finding foster homes for them.
Coleman's book tells of abominations set against selfless
courage. Yet the narrative stands
as an anomaly in the history of the Holocaust, for it was unsung for half a
century. After some minimal
publicity in late 1945, Moussa and Odette didn't speak of it again, nor did any
of the other participants. Most of
the children were unaware that they had been saved by an operation larger than
the people who hid them.
Then, in the 1990s, the story slowly started to
re-emerge. In 1992, after
comprehensive investigation, Israel honored seven Christian members of the
Network, including Bishop Rémond and Pastors Gagnier and Evrard, as
"Righteous among Nations," a citation given to non-Jews—such as the
better known Oskar Schindler—who put their lives at risk for Jews during the
Holocaust. Moussa and Odette
themselves relented from their silence in 1995, two years before Moussa's
death, when they were convinced to record seven hours of videotaped interviews
for a scholarly archive on the Holocaust at Yale. In 2008, a square in Paris near where the Abadis spent the
last forty years of their lives was named after them.
 |
| Place Abadi in Paris. [Source: Coleman's book.] |
A complete account still needed to be assembled. Coleman accomplished that through three
years of investigation, ferreting out long-buried records of many of the participants
and tracking down and interviewing some of the children, by then in their
seventies and eighties.
I couldn't help asking Coleman when I met him at one of his
book readings, "Why was there such silence for so long?" According to him, everyone in the Network
felt that they had simply done their duty, and that was the end of it. When I expressed wonderment at their
reticence, Coleman said that he thought it was "a generational
thing."
That suddenly rang a bell for me. Although I was too young to serve in the War, I have known
many who did, including scores of demobilized GIs with whom I went to
college. Few ever spoke of their
service as warriors unless under direct questioning, and often not then. A recent example: Only just before the
death of a friend who was eight years my senior, with whom I played tennis
several times a week for almost fifteen years, did I find out by happenstance
that he had been a torpedo pilot in the Pacific war, having repeatedly flown
missions where his life might have been snuffed out in an instant by the
devastating gunnery from ships he was attacking. Astounded, when I next saw him I asked why he had never
mentioned his war service to me. His
answer was an unassuming, "I just did my duty"; indeed, that simple
declaration was the hallmark of memorial comments about him at his funeral.
The generation of Americans who were forged by the Depression and annealed by service in World War II has been dubbed by
Tom Brokaw as the "Greatest Generation." In his words, it was a "generation of towering
achievement and modest demeanor."
Brokaw could well have included the same age cohort world-wide who, like
Moussa and Odette, fought the evil of fascism that was overrunning the earth.
For the righteous of that generation, who were legion, quietly doing
one's duty was quite unexceptional.
I'm afraid that "quietly doing one's duty" sounds
a bit corny to the modern ear, rather Victorian. It doesn't seem to be practiced much nowadays. Has it become rare enough to be
anachronistic?