Post #12 and #13 - Final Draft and Final Critique

Here are the links to Nick's critique of my paper

My critique of Nick's Paper

Post # 10 and #11 - Draft and Critique

I combined Post 10 and 11 into this one...
Link to My Paper

Link to My Critique of John's Paper

Presentation Pictures

Figure 3
Originally uploaded by mleahy1.

I have posted the pictures I found for my presentation if anyone wants to look at them. Click on the picture of Daniele Baurer and it will take you to my flickr site.

Post #9 - First Draft

First Draft.......without figures attached, they will be up soon I promise

MEMORIALIZING THE JEWISH CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST IN FRANCE

BY MADELIENE B. LEAHY
HIST 300: Introduction to Historical Methods
Spring 2005
Professor Petrik

The Holocaust killed 1.5 million Jewish children. In France, 11,402 Jewish Children were rounded up, transported in boxcars and, ultimately, sent to their deaths at concentration camps like Auschwitz. All over world there are monuments, museums, and memorials remembering them. These memorials have been established by governments who want to continue educating people about the Holocaust. The young boys and girls are also being remembered in books written by Serge Klarsfeld, in memorials established at the site of horrific events, and in the homeland established for the Jewish peoples and refuges of the Holocaust. Memorializing children killed during the Holocaust is an incredibly hard task to undertake. It is the books written by Serge Klarsfeld and the home in Izieu however, that best memorialize the children lost. These memorials have given respect to the victim, an understanding of the situation the children faced, and the lessons that can be learned through remembering.
A memorial, as defined by the Webster’s dictionary, means to commemorate a person or event with a monument or holiday. Also, it is intended to celebrate the memory of that person or event.[1] To commemorate a person could mean memorializing a person in a simple fashion such as a tombstone in front of a grave to marking life and death. Driving by a cemetery and viewing all the headstones is a way of memorializing the dead in the singular basis. Memorializing lots of people in one effort is challenging. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. is a premier memorial to the millions who died in Europe and Russia during the Holocaust. In the memorial museum, the victims are remembered throughout. The museum describes what happened during not only the Final Solution of the Holocaust but the rise of Adolf Hitler, the initial restrictions placed on the Jewish communities, and ending with the liberation. At the very end of the permanent exhibit, are the testimonial film clips of Holocaust survivors.
A memorial has to invoke viewers with certain feelings without ever stating precisely what the memorialist wants you to feel. Feelings of rage, sorrow, horror, fear, and helplessness are just some of the emotions felt by those viewing the Holocaust memorials. Indeed it is important to know that those emotions that are evoked by these terrible events are not as important as how they are evoked.[2] So how do you remember French Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust? The answer is you give them back their faces and their names.
Although many memorials around Europe and the world remember the children by giving them a brief plaque, it does not give them back their individual identities. The idea of a memorial is to give something back to whomever is being remembered. The memorials for the French Jewish children are all meant to give identity it the victims. As Serge Klarsfeld, a leading Holocaust memorialist, said in an interview, “giving [the victim] back their faces…I believe that these children, in a way, are somewhere still alive.”[3]
First it is important to know the facts regarding the Holocaust in France. As the Nazi army spread across Europe, so did the Jewish fear of being killed. The innocent were not spared. The Jewish adults understood a little of why the Nazi were persecuting them. The children had no idea why people hated them, however. They hadn’t a clue as to why they were being targeted with hatred.[4] In Serge Klarsfeld book, Children of Izieu, an idea circulates that the children of the Jewish people, particularly the ones in the quiet countryside of France, posed no threat to the Nazi regime. So why did the Nazis kill them? The answer is simple: the children were Jewish too.
In France, the war began when the French government signed an armistice with Germany.[5] The armistice was signed shortly after June of 1940, when Northern France and Paris came under direct control of the German occupation. Although claiming neutrality, the French lead by Henri Petain, conspired with the Germans and moved their capital to the southern town of Vichy. The French government willingly helped the Germans arrest and murder the 80,000 Jews living in France. Initially, the French were not ready to let the Germans send Jewish children to the gas chamber. But clearly, the evidence shows that the French Vichy government did not stop the Germans after they invaded and took control. Between October 1940 and June 1941 laws were instituted in France known as the “Statut des Juifs” or Laws of the Jews. These laws required the Jewish people in France to be excluded from “public life, required to be dismissed from civil work, and barred from professional jobs such as law and education.”[6]
Around July 1941, the Vichy government began to help the Germans round up Jews and transport them to internment camps such as Gurs, Beaune-la-Rolande, and others established throughout France. In these camps families were separated but were held until turn in transit selection. Adults without children however were taken straight to the Drancy transit center outside Paris.[7] Drancy was the last stop on convoys before heading to outside camps such as Auschwitz. In March of 1942, the first convey left Drancy bound to Auschwitz. (see figure 16 and 17 for convoy lists) The French authorities attempted to camouflage the deportations by excluding children from the deportations.[8] Soon children were not being excluded and the Germans arrested all Jews regardless of age. Deportations continued until June of 1944. The total number of Jews from France killed was 75,721 Jews. Of that 11,402 were children.
After the war, people streamed out of Eastern Europe trying to piece back together the lives they lost. Refugees searched throughout Europe for their families that might still have been alive.[9] Quickly, allied zones took in these refugees on route to new lives. Slowly the Holocaust victims rebuilt their lives. On May 15th, 1948, the new Israel state was established and thousands migrated there to put further distance between them and the past. After a few years, information surfaced about lost victims (information pertaining to who was alive or those who were killed) and people began to build memorials to the victims.
The types of memorials used to commemorate the children in France are done so through books and monuments. Both types are incredibly touching and can assault your sense in terms of what you are understand and viewing. In books a reader has the ability to travel through time and space to visit specific places of which the book speaks. It is this effect that many authors of memorials count on. They [memorialists] want their readers to feel and understand. While books cannot make you feel anything, they give you the tools in order to make yourself feel and understand what is being conveyed through the words of the book. Serge Klarsfeld has used the written word to memorialize the children and adults of the Holocaust. After many years compiling pictures and letters, Klarsfeld released his book French Children of the Holocaust: a Memorial in 1997. This book “gives back the faces of the French youngsters taken cruelly” during the Holocaust.[10]
Serge Klarsfeld, Nazi hunter and renowned memorialist, wrote a touching memorial to the French Jewish children killed by the Nazis and the French. In many of his books Mr. Klarsfeld, charges the French and Nazi officials with “brutal mistreatment” of Jews, as well as “clear disregard for human life.”[11] As a result of this clear hate for the Nazi and the Vichy government, Mr. Klarsfeld spent his adult life fighting for the French victims.[12] French Children of the Holocaust: a Memorial is written in both French and English to emphasize the impact languages have on history. [13]
In the book, Serge Klarsfeld spends 1,881 describing the history of the War and Holocaust in France. The first 400 pages of this book briefly describe the Nazis in France and the French Vichy government’s involvement in the arrests. Mr. Klarsfeld begins his memorial by listing each victim by name, age, and the convoy number they left on.[14] After setting up the tale, he further sets out to assault his reader’s humane side by spending the next 1400 pages of the book focusing on the children’s lives before the holocaust. (see figures 9 through 15) On this section of the book, Mr. Klarsfeld uses little written word and lots of pictures he discovered for the reader to understand more of the Holocausts impact on the innocent children’s lives. In this cases “a picture is worth a thousand words.” On these pages brief paragraphs about the photograph, and the victim can be found. Particularly, what convoy number they left France on. The children in the books were as young as newborns to as old as seventeen at the time they were sent on their convoys. It is most powerful section of the book. Looking at the pictures is reminiscent of photographs that can be seen throughout homes of relatives.
Klarsfeld spent decades finding the pictures of his victims, along with lost letters and former addresses.[15] He intended to spend the thousand pages of his book restoring as many names to the children as possible. It does not matter to him whether they were born French, what mattered to him was that they died French and for their religion. By restoring their names and faces, Klarsfeld attempts to give them back their childhoods that will forever be lost in the ashes and memory of the Holocaust, Auschwitz, and World War II France.
Memorializing, in regards to the Holocaust can be done in another way. This way is by establishing a monument as a memorial to the victims. Throughout Europe, there are memorials of this nature that invoke tragedy and emotion. Similar to books, monuments are meant to conjure up emotions within the audience.
The monument that stands at the side of the road in Izieu, France may not grab attention at first glance. (See figure 1) It sits back a several feet from the road next to what seems to be an empty farm home. At second glance the innocent faces engraved on the tall, slender monument evokes helpless feelings. This monument is dedicated to the forty-four children who were being sheltered in the Izieu children's home and the five adults in charge of them who refused to leave the children.
On April 6th, 1944 the Lyon Gestapo, under the command of Klaus Barbie, raided the home for children in the village of Izieu. The Gestapo struck without warning. Klaus Barbie and the soldiers rounded up the children and loaded them into the two trucks waiting outside. Without hesitation, they were all sent to Auschwitz on the first available convoy train.[16] It was the only time a home for Jewish children was singled out, raided, and deported in France during German occupation.[17]
The monument at Izieu, erected out of stone, along with the original house memorialize that tragic day and fifty lives lost in the Izieu round up. The house, established as a museum, sends out a lot of emotions at first glanced. (see figures 2 and 3) Inside La Maison d'Izieu, museum visitors feel the ever present sense of fear and hope. Little rooms, with little windows that over look an awe-inspiring view of the Rhone River and the Alps. The monument and subsequent museum allow the visitor into the atmosphere similar to the set of Sound of Music. The picturesque setting also assaults a person into wondering why something so tragic could happen to children in such a magical place. The curators of the museum have done an excellent job in first allowing its visitors to feel safe in this beautiful French countryside town of Izieu, near the Swiss border. The feeling of helplessness as the museum establishes the events of arrests and murders. Inside the building, former classrooms are restored to what they would have looked like in 1944, and the years before the arrest. (see figure 4) Bedroom dormitories create a personal setting of comfort. (see figure 5) The downstairs dining hall is set with tables and places for the children to eat. Along the walls are original art pictures the children drew while living there.[18] Furthermore the inside shows the age the building has undertaking in the past decades. (see figure 6)
The monument with the two innocent children staring back stands in front of the house. It stands at nearly five meters (nearly 16 feet high); it has triangular at the top and slender base. It was erected in 1946 by local masons. The plaque on the monument reads:
To the Memory of the forty-three children of the home at Izieu, of their director, and of their five guardians, arrested by the Germans April 6th, 1944, and exterminated in the camps or executed in German prisons.[19]
Another commemorative plaque mounted on the house in 1946 reads:
On April 6, 1944 Maundy Thursday, 43 children from the house at Izieu were arrested by the Germans with their guardians, then deported on April 15th 1944. Forty-one children and five of their guardians were exterminated in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. The director of the home and two of the other boys were executed in the fortress at Reval. Let the defense and the love of my fatherland be my defense before Thee, O Lord.[20]
The museum opened on April 4th, 1994, with President Jacques Chirac in attendance.[21] This memorial museum and monument are touching and like Serge Klarsfeld’s book are basic tools of teaching and remembering the events of the Holocaust.
The Holocaust is a hard thing to teach young children and yet one of the most important lessons they should learn. In fact, there are still some who like to believe that it never happened at all. This belief is probably the worst crime, to ignore its victims and disrespect their memory. In France and around the world the Holocaust victims are remembered on World Remembrance Day. At this time of the year teachers try to teach their classes about the Holocaust and its events. This is a memorial. Just the simple fact that you are remembering makes the event real. Ernest Nives, a survivor of Auschwitz, said to The New York Times in 1997 that, “…the Nazis were sure that these innocent children would be forgotten and nobody would care. We have not proven them wrong. We have rewritten a page of Holocaust history.”[22] Through memorials and education from the memorials, the Nazis have lost the battle to conceal there crimes against not only innocent children but innocent adults.
Teaching the lessons of the Holocaust in Europe is also a way of teaching about the other holocausts that have gone on in past and present times. History has blackened the world with genocidal events such as the Turks massacre of the Armenians in 1915, Josef Stalin’s attempt to massacre his own people during the nineteen-forties and fifties, the Hutus killing the Tutus in Africa, the “ethnic cleansings” that occurred in Yugoslavia in the early nineteen-nineties, and the current situation in Sudan. Future generations will learn about the holocausts that occur in other parts of the world, but it is important that they first learn about the systematic attempted to erase an entire religious group/race from Europe and the world. Remembering these victims and the children who died is memorializing them. They are committed to memory, they bring to mind feelings, and they remind us of what hate can lead to.
The “shriek of children does not make the Holocaust real”, nor does showing pictures of dead children make it real.[23] It is seeing the faces of the innocent children playing in their front yard before the war, or standing in front of the camera smiling carelessly. It is hard to feel the full impact of the Holocaust tragedy, even from something as significant as pictures. The audience viewing or reading the memorials are given a significant feeling from the memorial. Memorials like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum are bittersweet in the way the permanent exhibition assaults senses with smell and climate changes. Serge Klarsfeld’s book French Jewish Children of the Holocaust is the same way. Looking at these pictures makes you feel as if you are looking at old pictures of family members instead of children who were arrested, deported, and murdered.
Old photographs, open homes, and innocent faces are essentials for memorializing children. Through the photographs, viewers learn what life was like before the Germans invaded France. It is easy to tell that the children were innocent by their appearance, surroundings, and background of the pictures. The open home museum allows visitors to step inside to past for view of what life was like for the children who lived there. Furthermore, a person just looking at the innocent faces in the pictures and on the monument plaque gets immediate feelings of remembrance. The Holocaust was a tragedy, but within this tragedy was the loss of 11,000 Jewish children.[24] The memorial examples discussed created an environment that explained the children’s situation during the Holocaust, lessons that must be learned, and the most important thing, it gives back the respect to the victims lost. One can only hope that they received their names and faces back in their unfortunate deaths and in their memorials around the world.
[1] Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
[2] Aciman, Andre. “Innocence and Experience” The New Republic. Washington: Jan 19, 1998. Vol. 218 Iss. 3 pg, 26
[3] Mark, Jonathan
[4] Leiter, Robert. “The Story of the Lost Children”, Jewish Exponent. Philadelphia: May 16, 2002. Vol. 211 Iss. 20 pg. 46
[5]www.ushmm.org
[6] www.ushmm.org
[7] Henley pg. 1
[8] Sosnowski pg. 56
[9] www.ushmm.org
[10] Mark Jonathan
[11] Leiter, pg. 46
[12] Serge Klarsfeld was a victim himself. His father was arrested and sent to Auschwitz in 1942. Klarsfeld narrowly escaped being arrested. He has devoted his entire life to finding, arresting, and bring to justice the Nazis who killed so many of his friends and family, his father included.
[13] In French “Memorial des enfants Juifs déportés de France.
[14] Aciman pg. 3; Note: In France a total of 86 convoys left between March 1942 and Aug 1944.
[15] Shapirio, Susan. “Books in Brief: French Children of the Holocaust” NewYork Times Book Review. Feb. 9th 1997 pg. 21
[16] Dressler, Bernadette. http://www.izieu.alma.fr/
[17] Leiter, pg. 46
[18] http://www.izieu.alma.fr/anglais/frame_principale.htm
[19] Klarsfeld, Serge. The children of Izieu: a human tragedy. New York: H. Abrams, 1985. pg. 9
[20] Ibid pg. 10
[21] http://www.izieu.alma.fr/anglais/frame_principale.htm
[22] Roiphe, Anne. “Holocaust’s Children, One by One by One” The New York Times. Feb. 7, 1997, pg. C1 Note: Mr. Nives is in the Serge Klarsfeld memorial book, French Children of the Holocaust. There is a photograph of him at the ages of four sitting with his parents and brother. He is the only one who survived. After the war he moved to the U.S.
[23] Aciman pg. 5
[24] Leiter. Pg. 1

Post # 8 - The Outline

My outliine is pretty basic and after putting it together think it will be very useful for writing my paper. Although the number of parargraphs I mention is purely a guess and I cannot be certain how many I will actually use.

OUTLINE: MEMORIALIZING THE JEWISH CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST IN FRANCE

1. Introduction to the topic, followed by my thesis statement and argument for the paper
The Nazi Holocaust of Jews was divesting.

2-4. Brief review of World War II and the Holocaust in France. I will mainly be discussing conveys and arrests of Jewish Children. This will probably take two to three paragraphs.
In France an attempted was first made to camouflage the exterminatory character of the deportations of Jews by excluding children from them (Sosnowski pg. 56)
Excluded from power and condemned to physical annihilation, the Jews were scattered in society which, after the autumn of 1942, reacted in a way that could sometimes thwart the homicidal will of the government. (Lazare pg. 308)
The Massacre of Innocents: Far from attempting to save the children of Jews, the French authorities offered them up along with the adults. The Vichy suggested that children be sent along with adults even before the Nazis were ready to accept them…The Nazis did not bother with children on the first deportations…(Marrus pg. 263)

4-6. After the war what the French did to put into place a memorial for the children who were killed.

7. This paragraph will be devoted to what does it mean to memorialize.
- This may take two paragraphs but I am not sure until I write.

8-10. The types of memorials I have found dedicated to the children in France. I have have found two types, books and memorial sites both in France and in Israel, where the majority of Jewish memorials are, not just the ones pertaining to children or France.

11-16. Research and Examples:
1. Serge Klarsfeld Book: French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial
- The book itself is a memorial.
- it refers to itself as giving back the names and faces of innocent victims.
2. The monument/museum at Izieu:
- A commemorative plaque mounted on 1946 at the house reads: On April 6, 1944 Maundy Thursday, 43 children from the house at Izieu wre arrested by the Germans with their guardians, then deported on April 15th 1944. Forty-one children and five of their guardians were exterminated in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. The director of the home and two of the boys were executed in the fortress at Reval. Let the defense and the love of my fatherland be my defense before Thee, O Lord.

17. Wrap up on the Memorials and what they are doing for the education and realization of the Holocaust to present generations and future generations

18. Conclusion of my research and re-emphasis of my thesis.

Post # 7 - Bibliography (Updated again on April 7th)

Post #7 - Bibliography (Updated Version)
I spent all day reading articles and rereading books that I have either checked out or took notes on and here is what I have for my bibliography thus for:

Books

Brooks, Philip. Viewing the Holocaust Today. Chicago: Heinemann Library, 2003.

Holliday, Laurel. Children in the Holocaust and World War II: their secret diaries. New York: Pocket Books, 1995.

Jewish Children of France during World War II. Rockville: Friends and Alumni of OSE-USE, 2003.

Klarsfeld, Serge . French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial. New York: New York UP, 1998.

Klarsfeld, Serge. Memorial to the Jews deported from France, 1942-1944 : documentation of the deportation of the victims of the Final Solution in France. New York: B. Klarsfeld Fouundation. 1983

Klarsfeld, Serge. The children of Izieu: a human tragedy. New York: H. Abrams, 1985.

Lazare, Lucien. Rescue as resistance: how Jewish organizations fought the Holoacust in France. New York: Columbia UP, 1996.

Marrus, Michael. Vichy France and the Jews. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.

Samuel, Vivette. Rescuing the children: A Holocaust Memoir. Madison: University of Wisconsin P, 2002.

Schittly, Richard. Izieu, l'innocence assassinee: contributions a la memoire des enfants juifs rafles le 6 avril 1944. Paris: Seyssel: Editions Comp'Act, 1994.

Sosnowski, Kiryl. The tragedy of children under Nazi rule. New York: n.p., 1983.

Articles

Aciman, Andre. "Innocence and experience." Rev. of French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial, by Serge Klarsfeld. The New Republic 19 Jan. 1998.

Di Paz, Michel. "Klarsfeld charges France kept assets od deported Jews." Jewish Telegraphic Agency 20 July 1995: 6. ProQuest. 18 Mar. 2005

Dupuy, E J. "Jewish American and Holocaust Literature: representation in post-modern world." Choice. Mar. 2005: ProQuest. 18 Mar. 2005

Fishman, Boris. "Letter from Paris; Holocaust Memorial Performs A Strained Balancing Act." Forward 28 Jan. 2005. ProQuest. 18 Mar. 2005

Herman, Jerry. "'Children of Chabannes' shows town's good will during dark years." Jewish Bulletin of Northern California 9 June 2000. ProQuest. 12 Mar. 2005

Kaplan, Rachel. "French Jewry 50 Years After the Deportations." Inside. 30 June 1995: ProQuest. 12 Mar. 2005

Kraft, Dina. "New Holocaust museum puts human faces on 6 million deaths." Jewish Telegraphic Agency 7 Mar. 2005. ProQuest. 18 Mar. 2005

Leiter, Robert. "The Story of Lost Children." Jewish Exponent. 16 May 2002: 46. Proquest. 18 Mar. 2005

Mark, Jonathan. "Bringing the Children Back: In Serge Klarsfeld's monumental book, the faces of the French youngsters taken cruelly in the Holocaust come into view." Rev. of French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial, by Serge Klarsfeld. The New York Jewish Week 14 Feb. 1997: 33.

Roiphe, Anne. "Holocaust's Children, One by One by One." The New York Times 7 Feb. 1997, Late ed., sec. C. ProQuest. 18 Mar. 2005.

Sauvage, Pierre. "Among the Villagers of Le Chambon." Editorial. Forward 8 Oct. 2004

Shapiro, Susan. "Books in Brief: French Children of the Holocaust." Rev. of French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial, by Serge Klarsfeld. New York Times Books Review 9 Feb. 1997.

Internet

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. USHMM. 19 Feb. 2005http://www.ushmm.org.

The Holocaust Chronicle. 18 Mar. 2005 http://www.holocaustchronicle.org

"memorial." Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 31 Mar. 2005http://www.m-w.com/.

La Maison d'Izieu: Memorial Museum of the Children of Izieu. 2 Apr. 2005 www.izieu.alma.fr/

Post #6 - Progress Report

I have been working hard on trying to find my thesis for my paper. But I am having a problem creating what my paper will be about. I know and foresee that this will be my main problem for the next week or so. After doing my research at both the Holocaust Archives and the Library of Congress, I have my topic and my book research but now I need to focus on my article research. But I am not certain about what I want to write about. Do I want to write about the Children of the UGIF Center of Neuilly, or the children of Izieu? And what constitutes as an article? Is an article something from, for instance Newsweek Magazine about the subject or something from Historical Abstract database? I have pictures and copies of Primary sources that I have been transliterating but what kind of articles am I looking for?
Just thinking out loud but what is my thesis, what do I want my paper to say? Is there a narrow path I can take in order to get to my final goal: my paper? But what do I want my paper to say?