Rescue as Resistance: How Jewish Organizations Fought the Holocaust in France

by Lucien Lazare, Jeffrey Green

Overview

A survivor of the Holocaust and a distinguished scholar of Jewish history, Lucien Lazare presents a compelling defense of the Jewish resistance movement in France during World War II, arguing that rescue was a genuine and significant way of fighting back.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231101240
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	06/27/1996
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.32(w) x 9.27(h) x 1.22(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Lucien Lazare is scientific editor at the International Center for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. An active participant in Jewish resistance groups in France during World War II, he is a member of the Commission for the Designation of the Righteous among the Nations.

Jeffrey M. Green lives in Jerusalem and translates from Hebrew and French.

What People are Saying About This

Robert O. Paxton

Lazare perceives that among all those who resisted Nazism in Occupied France, the Jews were special: they alone were marked for extermination even if they never violated a law, and they alone were doomed if they obeyed all the laws. Starting from the unique character of the Jewish Resistance in France, Lazare can take all its forms as his province, from sheltering children to blowing up trains. He examines them all more fully than any other author, and he does it with care, sympathy, and vividness.

— Robert O. Paxton, Columbia University

Michael R. Marrus

With a keen eye for the diversity of circumstance in which the victims found themselves, Lucien Lazare makes a powerful case that Jews themselves had a vital role to play in rescue operations, particularly of Jewish children. Highly recommended as an antidote to notions of Jewish passivity, this book stresses the inventive, divergent, painstaking, risky, and often heroic strategies for survival adopted by many Jews in wartime France.

— Michael R. Marrus, University of Toronto

Editorial Reviews

Lazare perceives that among all those who resisted Nazism in Occupied France, the Jews were special: they alone were marked for extermination even if they never violated a law, and they alone were doomed if they obeyed all the laws. Starting from the unique character of the Jewish Resistance in France, Lazare can take all its forms as his province, from sheltering children to blowing up trains. He examines them all more fully than any other author, and he does it with care, sympathy, and vividness.

Robert O. Paxton

With a keen eye for the diversity of circumstance in which the victims found themselves, Lucien Lazare makes a powerful case that Jews themselves had a vital role to play in rescue operations, particularly of Jewish children. Highly recommended as an antidote to notions of Jewish passivity, this book stresses the inventive, divergent, painstaking, risky, and often heroic strategies for survival adopted by many Jews in wartime France.

Michael R. Marrus

I read Lucien Lazare's book when it was published in French. It is an important, well-researched document that must be read and studied by anyone interested in what happened in occupied France.

Elie Wiesel

Lazare, the science editor for the International Center for Holocaust Studies, Yad Vasham, in Jerusalem, participated in many of the events he describes. His is certainly not the first book on Jews in France during World War II nor on French resistance to the Nazis. But Lazare delves much further than any previous author into the question of what Jews did, rather than what was done to them. Using private and public archives from Israel, France, and the United States, plus hundreds of books and articles, Lazare documents the efforts of thousands of French Jews who rescued fellow Jews from prison, sheltered those who were in hiding, and enabled yet others to camouflage themselves as Aryans through false identification papers. His work is both poignant and authoritative; highly recommended for all libraries.Thomas J. Schaeper, St. Bonaventure Univ., N.Y.

Library Journal

Lazare, Holocaust survivor and scholar of Jewish history, argues that rescue--including such activities as smuggling Jews across borders or fabricating false papers--constituted a significant means of fighting back for French Jews and that, although unprepared for the severity of Hitler's genocidal onslaught, the Jews of France launched widespread and effective rescue and relief efforts following the first deportations in 1942. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

A challenge to traditional views of Jewish passivity in the face of the Holocaust.

One of the most contentious aspects of that tragedy concerns the disputed role of the Jews themselves during WW II. Introduced into the postwar debate about the Holocaust with Hannah Arendt's accusations against Jewish leaders in her landmark work Eichmann in Jerusalem, the Jews have since been accused of accepting extermination with resignation and docility. That scenario is effectively contested by Lazare, a Holocaust survivor himself, a member of the French Jewish underground during WW II, and scientific editor at the International Center for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. He presents overwhelming evidence that French Jews were active in the Resistance. And he demonstrates in compelling detail how Jewish resistance took many more forms than just armed insurgency. He traces how the myriad array of small actions undertaken by French Jews—from the establishment of underground networks to the smuggling of children across borders—eventually coalesced into a concerted and collective effort to survive the Nazi program of extermination. Besides the study's value in gathering this material, Lazare offers an important theoretical reconsideration. French Jews were acutely conscious of an inevitable fact: French gentiles could obey the laws of Vichy and occupied France and survive. Jews had no such option. Therefore, the Jewish Resistance in France, according to Lazare, was qualitatively different from the French Resistance. Christian French were fighting for their country's independence, while Jews were fighting for the survival of their people. This distinction generated much controversy when the book was published in France. Perhaps the formulation is overly rigid: The Resistance also saw itself as fighting for survival, both its own and that of civilization itself.

The controversy, however, does nothing to diminish Lazare's accomplishment in bringing to light an important episode in the history of the 20th century.

Kirkus Reviews