A bold, unsettling new film, La Rafle, depicts the horrendous events of July 1942 when the French authorities, at the behest of the Nazis, rounded up thousands of Jews who, in most cases, perished in the gas ovens of Auschwitz ...
It took France a long time to recognise the appalling truth. Once it did so, it showed itself honourable - if, in some senses, modest - in attempting to redeem a dreadful wrong.
French complicity in the war crimes committed by Nazi Germany on its own occupied soil is reason for unimaginable national disgrace.
Countries by and large are slow to come to terms with shameful episodes from history. When that history is relatively recent, the process is even more difficult, the countries more unwilling.
So Jacques Chirac, routinely mocked and condemned on the other side of the Channel, deserved praise for his momentous speech of July 16 1995 during a ceremony commemorating La Rafle - or roundup - of exactly 53 years earlier. Chirac is seen as a figure of the French Right (though his outlook and policies would fit comfortably into any New Labour Cabinet), but he did what his socialist predecessor, François Mitterrand, had refused to do: apologise on behalf on his country.
There was plenty of reason for contrition. On July 16-17 1942, French police and civil servants had obeyed their Nazi masters' voice and put into operation a plan to seize 13,152 Jews, 4,115 of them children, from their homes in Paris.
In fact, the idea had been to seize very many more; 10,000 or so escaped through the net. Those less fortunate, most born in France, were held in unspeakable conditions at the Drancy transit camp or in a cultural complex, the Vélodrome d'Hiver, and then camps in the Loiret, before being herded like condemned cattle into railway wagons taking them - in all but a few cases - to their deaths at Auschwitz.
La Rafle, the brainchild of a French journalist who may wish she did not bear the name of Roselyne Bosch, tells the story of the Vél d'Hiv roundup with dignity and shuddering impact. Due recognition is made of those brave and decent French people who did what they could to resist the evil taking place around them: the Red Cross nurse, Annette Leiris Monod, who worked valiantly to protect and care for victims, the ordinary Parisians who sheltered fugitives from the operation.
Perhaps the film tries too hard to be fair to the French. The occasional switch of emphasis to simultaneous occurrences in Vichy France portrays Marshal Pétain in a light some would regard as unduly benign. Powerful as the film may be, I am not sure it fully captures the squalor and brutality of the camps, though I am also unsure that we could bear to watch a film that did.
But it is impossible to watch the film, which I saw in a small seafront cinema at Cavalaire, without a mounting sense of disgust at those who were either directly responsible, or silently culpable. I thought more than once of Denise, the daughter of Irène Némirovsky, author of Suite Française (who also died in Auschwitz); Denise loathed what the Germans did, but loathed even more the French who were prepared to share their dirty work.
And along with the disgust, and memories of meeting Denise six years ago in Paris, was the feeling I have expressed more than once on these pages and elsewhere: that there for the grace of God went Britain. No one can shake my view that in similar circumstances, occupied by a vicious and highly effective force, we would have witnessed equally shameful events: Wembley or White Hart Lane, perhaps, would have been our Vél d'Hiver, Blackheath Common our Drancy or Beaune-le-Rolande camp, handily placed on the road to Dover.
How many among the British, right up to royalty, not only held sneaking regard for Hitler (at least until the outbreak of war) but heartily supported his anti-Semitic views?
Most of the rest of us hope we would have the strength and selflessness to resist, to put our lives and even those of our families on the line rather than stand by as rampant inhumanity invades our communities. Some of us would find that courage and fortitude, but many wouldn't. In the dark depths of wartime, terrible things occur that ordinarily well-meaning people are, or feel, powerless to prevent.
* La Rafle is out in France, Belgium and the French-speaking part of Switzerland. The International Movie Data Base gives no date for release in the English-speaking world.** Further reading: Love, war and a writer's tears
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