Olivier Philipponnat - The life of Irène Némirovsky, 1903—1942

That children, women, men, mothers and fathers should be treated like lowly cattle, that members of the same family should be separated from one another and taken off to an unknown destination; it was to be the fate of our age to witness this sad spectacle.

Monseigneur Jules Salige, Archbishop of Toulouse, Pastoral letter Et clamor Jerusalem ascendit, 23 August 1942

I T IS A WAGON fitted with a sliding door, used for transporting cattle. Straw has been thrown in and a bucket of water placed inside. The small, high air vents have been covered in barbed wire, so that it is impossible to escape once the sliding door has been closed. A prison on wheels, attached to another, which pulls a third, and so on. On 17th July 1942, this convoy is the sixth to leave France. Its nine hundred and twenty-eight passengers have not asked to leave, they have no tickets, they have only a suitcase and a few belongings. They do not know their destination and their loved ones do not know where they are going.

Some of these travellers have been misleadingly convened during the round-up of the Jews in Paris, on 14th May 1941, for verification of status. Since then, they have been stagnating in a very basic camp, from which it would have been so easy to escape had they not been terrified of exposing their families to reprisals. Over the past few weeks, women and children have also been arrested. It was a task made all the simpler since all or nearly all of them declared themselves to the authorities: what did they risk, in France, by conforming to the law? Others, like her, were taken from their homes only a few days previously. They were not surprised at their arrest: ever since October 1940, the police have been authorised to intern Jews in special camps, at the discretion of the prfets, the local chief commissioners.

For they are all Jews, all foreigners: tantamount to an offence in occupied France. They have walked through Pithiviers in single file, suitcase in hand, past the windows of the local inhabitants. They passed the sugar refinery, stepped over the railway lines, and walked through the wooden gate guarded by a policeman. Once registered, they were led into some large military sheds where bedsteads covered in straw could accommodate about one hundred adults. Needless to say, the Loiret region could have done without this gift, Lcho de Pithiviers regretted on 24th May 1941. Nevertheless, carefully supervised, the foreign Jews will not be too dangerous. And it is far preferable, all things considered, to know that they are behind barbed wire fences instead of running our town halls and our important services The purging of France has thus begun in earnest. Let us admit that it was very necessary and that it has not come a moment too soon.

The French police put in charge of guarding the camp are not bad men. Just disciplinarians. Some of them helped with the visits and the receiving of parcels, and they posed for souvenir photographs with the prisoners. But since the summer of 1941, the rules have been tightened. Refusing to do forced labour in the neighbouring farms, several hundred prisoners eventually absconded. As a retaliatory measure, no further leaves were permitted and visits were cancelled. It became pointless to try to evade the guards, who were stationed in watchtowers and behind the railings. Once they were recaptured, those who had escaped were locked up for a few days in a small prison made of corrugated iron, open to the full sunlight. The German authorities decided to convert this collection of sheds and those at Beaune-la-Rolande, built in 1940 to house potential prisoners of war, into transit camps for the concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Poland. Over there, all these Jews can be herded in their tens of thousands, far from prying eyes, and when the time camesometimes immediatelymurdered in the gas chambers, which have been in operation since earlier in 1942.