search engines,Friday Finds (Dec 12, 2008)

After reading Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay, I searched out her reading recommendations and here are a few books that I think are must reads. In order to know history, we have to read the ugly part of it too. Shamefully, before reading Sarah's Key, I was not aware of the role of French police in the Holocaust.

Remember. Never forget.



Not the Germans Alone by Isaac Levendel

On June 5th, 1944, the eve of D-day, Isaac Levendel's mother left the farm in southern France, where she and her son had gone to escape the Nazis, to make a brief trip home to pick up the last of their belongings. She never returned. For more than 40 years, Levendel was tormented by her disappearance. Finally, in 1990, he began to look for answers. He found shocking evidence of widespread French collaboration and government collusion with the Nazis. This is Levendel's story, a powerful exploration of a shameful chapter in history
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French Children of the Holocaust by Serge Klasrfeld

Serge Klarsfeld, a tireless Nazi hunter who located Klaus Barbie, among others, and the author of 20 books on the Holocaust, has compiled an astonishing, haunting document which restores to us the memory of 2500 children deported by the Vichy government to the German death camps. French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial has a b&w picture of each child, with a short paragraph detailing his or her place of birth, parentage and manner of deportation. By forcing us to confront each victim individually, Klarsfeld not only allows readers a vital historical connection to them but has shown how any attempt to explain their plight must fail.
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Bad Faith by Carmen Callil

In the 1960s, Carmen Callil visited a psychiatrist called Anne Darquier; they forged a close bond, tragically broken when Anne committed suicide. Years later, by chance, Carmen discovered that Anne's father was the French war criminal, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix.

Louis Darquier was a French Nazi a collaborator and a con man - appropriating the aristocratic 'de Pellepoix' and styling himself 'Baron'. He married a failed Australian actress, Myrtle Jones, and Anne, their only child, was abandoned to a nurse at birth. She was raised, in poverty, in Oxfordshire.

Their extraordinary story - and that of Louis Darquier's ascent to power before and during the Second World War is the keyhole into a revelatory account of the terrible acts of the Vichy government during the war years. Louis Darquier - always broke, always desperate for attention, social cachet, women and drink - became the longest serving Commissioner for Jewish Affairs in the Vichy government. Most of the over seventy thousand French Jews who died in Auschwitz were sent to death during his tenure. He was never brought to justice.