Poetry is resistance.
The day before yesterday, quite by chance, I discovered the second part of Marcel Ophüls’s 1969 historical documentary The Sorrow and the Pity: The Choice, in tribute to him following his recent passing in May.
I was stunned by the quality of the compelling archival footage and the sometimes chilling testimonies, of unrepentant collaborators, of repentants, of resistance fighters, of Jewish survivors, of Germans, of British…
« Me, I was a petit bourgeois; I went to Lycée Pasteur. The Jewish question didn’t even exist for us, we weren’t religious. And when I learned I was Jewish, through others, I was first devastated to feel rejected by my national community and by this country I loved, not because I was born here, but because I learned to love it through its history, which I found beautiful. And so I began to take an interest in Jews.
And I believe engaging in debates over numbers means playing with impossible arithmetic in realms where numbers cannot justify the indefensible. The fact that a French government accepted handing over its own citizens and even other nationals it was supposed to protect, thus renouncing France’s traditional right of asylum, proves that it was not a government worthy of bearing the French label nor of embodying what we love in this homeland.
France collaborated, it was the only country in Europe whose government actively collaborated. Others merely signed armistices or capitulated in the field. Only France enacted laws, laws that, including on racist grounds, went even further than Nuremberg, because French racist criteria were more demanding than German racist criteria.
So it is not a glorious chapter, it is perhaps unsurprising that school textbooks present only the glorious page, but from a historical standpoint, that is certainly false.
I was arrested because I was part of the FTP (Francs‑Tireurs et Partisans) at seventeen.
[…]
I spent a year in a French prison. I saw seven of my comrades from our group executed in the prison courtyard by French gendarme firing squads. And on July 2, 1944, I was handed over to the SS along with all my fellow prisoners by the French penitentiary administration, the only one in Europe to commit the dreadful act of delivering bound inmates into German custody.
I was deported on what we called the train of death because it remained on the tracks for two months attacked and strafed by British aircraft which did not know it carried deportees. I managed to escape on August 25, 1944, and we arrived in Dachau on August 27. It was then that I learned my parents, whom I had been searching for for four years, had been deported.
France was covered with concentration camps: Gurs, Argelès, Rivesaltes, Fort‑Barraux, Drancy… And it wasn’t only Jews, there were Spanish Republicans, Freemasons, Roma… All of them were handed over, in small batches, to the Germans, as convoys and requests demanded. »
— Claude Lévy
At the end, he speaks of the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup, the French government was praised for its collaboration with the Germans, so meticulous, so anticipatory, and we learn the Germans had not intended to deport children under sixteen, 4 051 of them, but Laval insisted that the children be deported even after repeated pleadings, including that of Pastor Boegner who pleaded their cause.
I’d now like to draw a parallel with the present day,
this Monday, June 2, as I was returning from work in Nantes to the place I am staying, the bus stopped in the middle of a demonstration, a human chain, peaceful and united. I quickly realized it was in homage to the Palestinian people, a gesture of solidarity on our modest scale. Without thinking, I stepped off the bus to join the chain and march through Nantes for the first time. The atmosphere echoed that of Zurich, culminating in the reading of a magnificent poem by Ziad Medoukh, read with such depth that my tears welled up. The speaker said, “Poetry is resistance,” and that is why I write today, to echo their anguish, to tell them that my heart stands with them.
If we bury ourselves in silence, tomorrow the fate of the Palestinians will be that of Arabs, Muslim or not, French or not, here in Europe. The tragic fate of the Jews during humanity’s darkest hours is intimately tied to the fate of Arabs today. This documentary echoes the paroxysm of horror built over years of propaganda casting Jews as the scapegoats of all society’s ills, illusions produced by those who embody discord.
Younis M.