POSTFACE
by the author |
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His position with respect to
the extermination
of the Jews at Birkenau and the personal
experiences
that led him to undertake this study |
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I am not a Jew and I was at one time a
“revisionist”. After reading this book, some will no doubt think that
I still am one. This is quite possible and I bear them no grudge. The
distinction between these two fiercely opposed schools, the
“exterminationists” and the “revisionists”, becomes
meaningless once a certain threshold of knowledge about the former
Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp has been reached. I have passed this
point of no return.
Any normal human being, visiting the Auschwitz
camp for the first time, feels a deep emotional shock. The weight of history
allows of no other response. An ordinary but motivated tourist, I nearly did
away with myself one evening in October 1979 in the main camp, the Stammlager,
overwhelmed by the evidence and by despair. I have often wondered how I would
have been able to perform this act of self-destruction. Since that lugubrious
evening, I have spent a total of almost three months, spread over ten visits
between 1979 and 1984, studying the German archives in the Auschwitz State
Museum, examining the ruins of Birkenau, trying to understand and put into
place the pieces of this gigantic and incredible puzzle. After the first few
visits, I no longer saw the barbed wire fences surrounding the camp, directly
visible from the windows of the first floor of Block 24 which houses the
Archives. They had become invisible to me, as I was myself, melted into the
town of Oswiecim, where it was impossible to identify in my Polish silhouette,
hidden among so many others, the Frenchman in his tie and three piece suit who
had disembarked from the “LOT” twin engined aircraft at Balice the
day before.
As the years passed, I experienced the fever that overcame
the country, sweeping aside all in its path, saw the birth of Hope, the first
inscriptions under the mantle of “Solidarnosc”, patriotic songs sung
by the family, almost open listening to western radio broadcasts, the explosion
of red and white arm bands, strikes and sit-ins where production continued 24
hours a day, the waiting, in anguish but holding firm, for the armoured
divisions massed to the east, but which never came. I experienced the curfew,
totally deserted shops, meatless days, coffee rationed to 100 grammes for two
months and whose coupons enabled one only to obtain a bottle of vodka. I
experienced the return to normal. In other words, I shared in the ordinary and
difficult everyday life of a town in the south of Poland called Oswiecim, once
known as Auschwitz.
I have brought back some bad habits, such as
drinking tea, knocking myself out with hard liquor when things are going badly
and all looks grey, skipping meals, fiddling on the gasoline, knowing the value
of the dollar, understanding the meaning of the verb “to organize”. I
have also fallen under the spell of the “Lady in Ermine”, by Leonardo
da Vinci, jewel of the Czartoryski collection; learned to be satisfied with
little and to be patient, and finally, I came away with a great love for Poland
and its people. I emerged proud, not of being a Frenchman from France, but of
having a French mind and living in France. And I am now innoculated for life
against any form of totalitarian system.
I became a historian of the
Auschwitz Krematorien purely by accident for I am a pharmacist by profession.
Looking for the origins of my interest in a past that does not appear to have
much to do with my own, and in such an uninviting subject, means delving right
back to my early childhood.
My family came from Poitou. My parents moved
to the Paris region before the war, attracted by the capital and taking
advantage of an offer made by the government. They were caught there by the
war. My father, who was a captain in the reserve, fought a “splendid”
campaign in the north, culminating in Dunkirk and its Stukas, and a Channel
crossing in which he had to change boats half way across, the first having been
too badly damaged to continue. After three days’ well-earned rest in
England, he was sent back to the continent to participate in the Battle of
France, from which he emerged unscathed, just avoiding capture by the Germans
and anticipating the Armistice by a few days. Demobilized in the free zone, he
returned to his civilian functions. He was not contacted by the Resistance for
the simple reason that his local chief, being a doctor and thus being entitled
at that time to the military rank of warrant officer, did not want to recruit a
clandestine fighter of higher rank than himself. Although a Christian, my
father did have a scare one day in the street, when a German police control
found that his nose had a semitic look about it. It was not really possible for
him to trace his family tree back far enough to show that the Arabs had reached
Poitiers before being defeated there by Charles Martel in 732. But his genes
could remember this.
Born early in 1944, I was six months old when the
Germans departed. My knowledge of the war is limited to my impressions as a
foetus and young baby. Our family was relatively little affected by the war
except, according to my parents, for some disagreeable periods as from 1944,
when the food supply became homoeopathic and barely edible. The allied bombing
forced my mother to take refuge in the cellar and her enlarged belly bounced at
each step. As we were living in Villepinte, famous before the war for its
sanatorium, we had to put up with the fighting between the Americans and the
Germans at the Liberation. I took all this with Olympian calm, sleeping like a
log in the midst of the shooting, even though it appears that some shots passed
through the house . Despite the proximity of Drancy, nobody suggested to me, as
a purely Catholic baby, that I should take a trip to the disquieting land of
“Pitchipoï”, unlike some other dear little angels, some of whom
had a first name not unlike my own. They had this trip imposed upon them and
were deported some 1700 kilometres to the east, to the void of
“Pitchipoï”*. The hundreds of thousands of visitors to the
remarkable and famous exhibition held in the Berlitz Palace from 7th September
to 14th December 1941 ** had learned to distinguish at a glance between them
and me. Visual acuity has never been the same since August 1944.
On the
paternal side, all I had left was my grandmother, who lived not far from
Civray. She was a solitary peasant woman whose husband had been killed in the
“race for the sea” in 1915. Then the Normandy landings came at last,
and four days later, on 10th June 1944, 75 kilometres from where she lived,
there was an event that has marked the region for ever, the tragedy of
Oradour-sur-Glane (Photo 1].
All the surrounding populations
were greatly affected, even distant families such as ours, so strong were the
bonds of kinship at that time. My earliest memories were marked by the end of
the world war and by this tragedy. A tank of the 2nd Armoured Division, a jeep
and some soldiers made up a substantial proportion of my favorite toys, a
faithful reflection of the era. I rediscovered the Liberation, with Leclerc,
Juin, Tassigny and de Gaulle, in the magazines my father had bought, as soon as
I was old enough to be able to leaf through them. The silhouettes of Sherman
tanks and half tracks were more familiar to me than that of the Renault car.
The irruption of the military universe into my existence is explained by the
fact that we had moved. As from the 50s, my parents were working at La
Boissière Ecole. La Boissière, “a smiling little
village in the outer suburbs of Paris”, received its scholastic suffix
only long after the opening, on 4th November 1886, of
“L’Ecole Militaire Enfantine Hèriot”, taking
children from 5 to 13 years old to be reared by the army and “brought up
in the cult of Honour and the Fatherland”. The proximity — [ only had
to cross the road — of the military college meant that my horizon was
veiled in dark blue, the color of the college uniform. It was not until very
much later that I realized this.
My grandmother came to stay with us and
enjoy the company of her grandson from time to time. On Thursdays, when my
parents went to Paris, she looked after me. She would read me G Bruno’s
“Le tour de la France par deux enfants”, a classic work
found in all our schools, recounting the joys and sorrows of two young children
from Lorraine. An extraordinary tool of revanchiste propaganda, it served on
our side as an unconscious alibi for the generations of simple peasants who
massacred one another in the stupid butchery of 1914-18. It remains famous for
its caption on page 188, under the heads of four men: “THE FOUR RACES OF
MAN — The white race, the most perfect of the human races...”
Grandmother’s reading was just a pretext, or rather an introduction, for
her own anecdotes and tales. Oradour, destroyed by the SS, could not fail to be
one of them. During our visits “to see the family” , it was not
unusual for me to come across a pamphlet or illustrated book dealing with this
massacre. The photographic montages with a dark SS shadow falling across the
white ruins and the red sky made a very strong impression on a young mind. I
think I visited the actual ruins of Oradour several times during this period,
but I remember very little of it. When I was twenty I went back there in the
height of summer. Life was everywhere, with grass and other plants reclaiming
their rights. The contrast between my memories and the present reality seemed
to me to be ridiculous and irreconcilable. These thoughts within the the ruined
walls overgrown by vegetation no longer mean anything now that Franco-German
reconciliation and friendship are the main pillars of Europe. I have never
understood, and still do not understand, why the village of Oradour, except for
the church, has not been rebuilt, and by the Germans. The human experience of
Oradour should be enshrined in itself, in its flesh and in its spirit, not
symbolized by paltry ruins.
At the age of ten, completely conditioned by
the military entourage of La Boissière, I had to take the
military schools entrance examination in order to be able to continue my
schooling at the La Flèche Military Academy. I passed in spite of
myself and put on the uniform of the Brutions. Despite appearances, I was never
actually an army pupil — my parents paid a fee. admittedly very modest,
but in return for this I was free to leave the school if I so desired, and the
school administration was free to throw me out if my school results were not up
to scratch. It was an excellent arrangement which, while it filled me with fear
in the lower classes, appeared highly profitable at the end of my schooling, by
giving me the opportunity of leaving free of all obligations towards the army
apart from the normal military service. So many pupils took advantage of this
possibility that the only ones left in the classes preparing for entry to the
army, navy and air force officers' colleges were real “army boys ”
trying desperately to rise above the mediocre career of non-commissioned
officer imposed as “payment” for their free schooling. During the
eight years I passed within these “ancient”, walls, I only once heard
a far-sighted officer deplore this state of affairs. This was in a speech
before my company one day when the results were being announced. The lower
classes of the academy were of no use to the military and virtually invariably
turned the boys against the army. In a “Journal des
Voyages”, of 30th October 1904, I found an article on the
Academy by Major Annet, in which he wrote: “The fact is that the pupils
are subjected to a barracks regime too early, and this sometimes turns them
against the army, so that the results obtained are perhaps not always in line
with the sacrifice made by the State”. The situation still remained
unchanged half a century later. |
| The transition from family to military life was
difficult. A solitary and individualistic boy, I was plunged into a collective
and prison-like milieu. I had to resign myself to this as best I could. The
intellectual and moral training I received was of great value, but was suited
to the years 1940-50 and totally inappropriate for the years to follow. My only
means of escape from the austere way of life was to read and to dream. A book
is freedom. In a life based on discipline and school work, the good or bad
results of which directly influenced friendships, only |
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| Translator's
notes: |
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| * |
Pitchipoï: Name
given by the Jewish children interned in Drancy to the unknown place in the
East where the Jews were go (Auschwitz-Birkenau). |
| ** |
Exhibition entitled
“Le Juif et la France”, [The Jew and
France]. |
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