April 29



USA----NEW YORK:

Exhibition Review
Sorrow, Pity, Celebration: France Under the Nazis
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
When the young French soldier Louis Althusser was taken prisoner of war by
the Nazis in 1940, he tossed scraps of paper out of the train that was
carrying him away, asking whoever found them to send them to his uncle in
Paris. The last word from French soil, reads one. The train that shakes my
handwriting is still rolling, and I believe that we are headed for
Germany.

So they were, and Althusser, who would later become one of Frances most
renowned Marxists, spent the entire war in a prison camp.

In this he may have been lucky, sequestered from the confusions,
qualifications, animosities, compromises, accommodations, betrayals and
resistance of other French writers, who watched some cheering, some
fearing as the Germans rolled over Frances defenses in the spring of that
year. The victors turned the nation into a Nazi fief and made Vichy less
well known for its water than for being the center of Marshal Philippe
Ptains collaborationist regime.

One of the astonishing things about the exhibition Between Collaboration
and Resistance: French Literary Life Under Nazi Occupation, at the New
York Public Library, is that it feels as if we were looking at scores of
relics tossed from speeding trains, each of them heading in a different
direction, each expressing different hopes and expectations.

There is a postcard from the man who would later become the prophet of the
avant-garde French novel, Alain Robbe-Grillet, who informs his father how
much he is enjoying the companionship of his countrymen during forced
labor in Germany. There is a 1940 letter from the philosopher Henri
Bergson, who had been prepared to convert to Roman Catholicism but, out of
solidarity with his people, signed the new French governments register as
a Jew. I have seen this coming for several years now, he writes. We have
touched the bottom of the abyss. At least we will now know where the evil
comes from.

Some writers celebrated that evil. The Prix Goncourt winner Henri Braud
cheered the new regime in editorials for the right-wing weekly Gringoire.
His fellow travelers sampled the high life of the German Institute in
Paris, directed by Karl Epting. One photo here from 1941 shows the
Parisian reception for a performance of Wagners Tristan und Isolde in
which Winifred, the composers daughter-in-law (and a friend of Hitler),
can be glimpsed, along with the startlingly young German conductor Herbert
von Karajan.

Some writers simply went along with the dominant power for the ride, if
not the ideology Jean Cocteau, it is suggested here, was among them.
Others put out clandestine magazines (over 1,000 have been catalogued) or
even established an underground publishing house, trying to counter the
more glossy lures of Signal, a Hachette-published weekly that celebrated
the coming of a new era.

Some, like Jean-Paul Sartre, made their way through the morass with
cunning and swiftness; the premiere of Sartres No Exit in occupied Paris
had discordant resonance for those who found other kinds of hellish
visions in their surroundings. Some, like Irne Nmirovsky, whose manuscript
of Suite Franaise is on display, stayed blind to the full extent of what
was happening until it was too late. Nmirovsky took the opposite path of
Bergson; though Jewish, she converted to Roman Catholicism for protection,
which didnt prevent the French police from delivering her up to the Nazis
as a Jew. And a few very few like Andr Malraux joined the underground
armed forces to fight the Germans.

In other words, the responses were as complicated, mistaken, courageous,
baleful and banal as the responses of many others in that crucial time,
and that complexity is part of the exhibitions point. The show was
conceived by Olivier Corpet, the director of the Institut Mmoires de
ldition Contemporaine, who presented it with the curator Claire Paulhan in
Caen, France, in 2008 as a display of a growing archive of war material.

That show has been reshaped here by Robert O. Paxton, an emeritus
professor of social science at Columbia, whose 1972 book, Vichy France,
outlined how avidly collaborationist that regime really was. Objects from
the French archives are included, along with selections from the librarys
collections and private loans.

At the center of the exhibition space, newsreels of the period taken from
the 1969 Max Ophls film, The Sorrow and the Pity, form a depressing loop.
And screenings of films produced in France during the Nazi occupation,
including Marcel Carns classic Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of
Paradise), will be shown at the New York Public Library for the Performing
Arts at Lincoln Center every Tuesday in June. A companion book, by the
French curators, is also being published.

But there is so much material here and it is so nuanced in presentation
that it can be difficult to clarify the different stands writers took and
why. The exhibition can sometimes overwhelm with detail, particularly
because so much concerns unfamiliar literary figures.

A sense of disorder is partly the welcome price of seeing so much. We
learn, for example, that France became the food basket of the German
armies, creating drastic shortages. Paper was so hard to find that it was
rationed to reward collaborationists. The avant-gardist Jacques Audiberti
wrote his novel Monorail on fragments of wallpaper supplied by his father,
a builder, though you suspect that he might have also liked the subtle
provocation of the medium.

There is also something discomfiting about seeing the well-worn card file
of books banned by the Nazis in France cards that must have often been
consulted by the library that kept it on hand, beginning in 1940. But it
is more unsettling to read the associated manifesto that French publishers
readily agreed to:

In order to organize a common existence free of difficulties between the
German Occupation army and the French population, and thereby to establish
normal relations between the German and French peoples, the French editors
undertake the responsibility to organize intellectual production.

Particularly noted in this manifesto are books by political refugees or
Jewish writers who, betraying the hospitality that France extended to
them, unscrupulously pushed for war, from which they hoped to draw profit
for their egotistical purposes.

The exhibition explains the French defeat as a military failure: the
nation mistakenly rushed a third of its forces into Belgium and southwest
Netherlands, believing the Germans would attack as they did in 1914; that
left the supposedly invulnerable Maginot line permeable.

But the exhibition also shows that a strong current of thought welcomed
this defeat as an opportunity. The poet Paul Valry in one notebook here
excitedly foresees something extremely new. Alfred Fabre-Luce, a
conservative journalist, declares in his journal: We are at the threshold
of a new era.

Major schisms between the left-wing Popular Front and the political right
characterized the 1930s in France, but among many there was also a belief
that Frances Third Republic was doomed and dissolute.

In contrast, a spirit of renewal and redemption was perceived beneath the
Nazi ideology. Ptain was cheered after the armistice was signed, which
Hitler staged in the same railway car in which Germany submitted to France
in 1918. Ptain promised a national revolution enshrining Work, Family,
Fatherland.

It mattered little that France had assured Britain it would make no
separate peace with Hitler. Besides, German dominance was unavoidable:
what hope did England have?

In fact, we now know many people felt similarly in Britain in 1940. Had
Churchill not prevailed, it is likely that acquiescence, along with
Germanys reassurance of autonomy, would have ended the war in Western
Europe. The moral muddiness of Vichys waters would have spread their
intoxicating delusions.

That lure cannot be overestimated, which is one reason that those who saw
clearly deserve more distinctive celebration than they get here. The
Communists had been ideologically opposed to Nazism but they had also
shown themselves willing to shift stands when Moscow aligned itself with
Hitler. Moral clarity was even rarer among those who chose not to leave
France or did not have to flee in fear.

The aftermath of the occupation, the exhibition shows, posed its own moral
challenges, marked by denunciations and purges. Philippe Burrins book
France Under the Germans suggests that 10,000 to 20,000 women were
punished for having sexual liaisons with the occupiers; more than 50,000
children were said to have been born as a result of those relationships.
There were trials, executions and murders.

This is one reason the Communist Party became so powerful in postwar
France. After the Hitler-Stalin pact disintegrated, the partys opposition
to Hitler was unswerving, beyond question.

This is not, though, a tale of heroism or far-ranging insight. Though Mr.
Paxton shows that poets were, as a group, particularly resistant to the
collaborationist lure, for the most part, the touted visionary powers of
writers left all too much in darkness.

"Between Collaboration and Resistance: French Literary Life Under Nazi
Occupation" runs through July 25 at the New York Public Library, Fifth
Avenue and 42nd Street; (212) 930-0800, nypl.org.

(source: New York Times)




POLAND:

Message in a bottle from the Holocaust
On September 9, 1944 seven young men buried a message in a bottle at the
Auschwitz death camp.


Near the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland, workers
found a message in a bottle written by prisoners. Written in pencil and
sealed in a bottle, the message was dated September 9, 1944 and bears the
names, camp numbers and hometowns of seven young detainees hailing from
Poland and France. Officials of the museum at the site said that the
bottle had been buried in a concrete wall in a school that slave laborers
were forced to repair.

The note reads "All of them are between the ages of 18 and 20, in
reference to the young men who left a trace of their existence in a place
where 1.1 million people were exterminated." The victims were largely Jews
from throughout Europe, but also Gypsies and non-Jewish Poles.

6 of the prisoners were from Poland and one was from France. The note
gives the names as: Bronislaw Jankowiak, Stanislaw Dubla, Jan Jasik,
Waclaw Sobczak, Karol Czekalski, Waldemar Bialobrzeski and Albert Veissid.

Albert Veissid, one of the young men mentioned in the letter, is alive and
now resides in France. Two of the others definitely survived the
Holocaust. Karol Czekalski remained in contact with the museum at
Auschwitz until the 1960s but has not been heard from since. It is not
known whether Czekalski or Wachaw Sobczak - the other survivor - are still
alive.

(source: EnergyPublisher)





AUSTRIA:

Austrian Holocaust denier sentenced to five years in jail


Notorious Austrian Holocaust denier Gerd Honsik was sentenced to five
years in prison Monday by a Vienna court that found him guilty of
spreading National Socialist ideology.

While living in Spain from the early 1990s to evade a previous Austrian
prison sentence, the neo-Nazi had continued to publish National Socialist
ideology in a magazine and other venues.

"He is one of the ideological leaders of the neo-Nazi scene," prosecutor
Stefan Apostol said Friday, alleging that Honsik had also passed out his
publications at schools.

Both the prosecution and the defendant plan to appeal the verdict and
sentence, Austrian press agency APA reported.

The 67-year-old defendant said he rejects "the doctrine which demonizes
National Socialism," but claimed he was not a National Socialist himself.

Honsik, who wrote the book Acquittal for Hitler? in 1988, defended himself
by arguing that he did not deny the existence of all the gas chambers in
Nazi concentration camps.

After his lawyer, Herbert Schaller, pointed out that it was not Honsik but
"fine and righteous foreigners" who had first denied the existence of gas
chambers, the prosecutor said he would consider whether to also indict
Schaller under Austria's law banning National Socialist activities.

In 1992, an Austrian court passed an 18-month prison term against Honsik
for denying the crimes committed by Hitler's regime. Before starting his
sentence, Honsik fled to Spain, but he was eventually extradited in 2007.

Another prominent Holocaust denier, the British writer David Irving,
received a sentence of two years in prison and one year of probation from
Austrian courts in 2006.

(source: DPA)