Pedro Lilienfeld

I described in my autobiography that the start of World War II – September 3rd, 1939 – occurred as my family and I were estivating in St. Brévin-les-Pins, a small coastal resort town on the French Atlantic coast. Within a few days, my father, Erich, was interned with other able bodied men of German, Austrian and Czech origin in camps (camps d’internment) set up by the French authorities (regardless of whether these foreigners were Jewish or not). Some of these camps had been put in place previously to confine thousands of Spanish republican refugees fleeing the vindictive troops of Generalísimo Francisco Franco.

Elders, women and children of “Germanic” extraction were ordered to move to specifically designated towns in the French countryside (centres de séjour surveillé). Thus, my mother, Gerda, her parents and I were confined to the town of Chateaubriant, inland about 50 miles northeast of St. Brévin where we had been spending the summer months.

Understandably, my family viewed this forced relocation as extremely upsetting and disheartening, considering that we were unable to return to our home in Paris, and being able to carry with us only the minimal summer clothing and related items that we had taken for our coastal vacation sojourn. Little did we surmise that this involuntary and apparently unfortunate displacement may well have saved our lives. Had we all been back in Paris at that moment, we would have been unable to leave the capital and eventually could have, very likely, been rounded up by either the French or the Nazi authorities and then deported to Auschwitz as what happened to some 50,000 Parisian Jews. As I mentioned in my autobiography, a dear friend of our family, Dr. Wally Steinthal, committed suicide in Paris to avoid such capture and subsequent fate.

Perhaps our survival in Paris could have been possible only if we had been able to hide in Fourestier’s home as did my grandmother, Dola, during the four years of German occupation. Whereas hiding her alone proved to be challenging but ultimately successful, to do so for the additional five of us could have been extremely difficult if at all possible and, potentially, very risky for the entire family, including the Fourestiers.

My mother, her parents and I were to remain confined in the town of Chateaubriant from early September 1939 until early July 1940 when we escaped to the unoccupied Vichy zone in southern France. From June 17 on we had been under direct Nazi military occupation. That entire eight-month period between September 1939 and May 1940 was later to be called Drôle de guerre by the French, Phony War (German: Sitzkrieg), because although France and Great Britain were officially at war with Germany, there were no major hostile engagements between the two sides of the conflict. The Phony War ended abruptly when the Germans went into full Blitzkrieg attack mode invading the Low Countries and France on May 10, 1940.

In November 1942, the Nazis occupied the entirety of France, including the Vichy zone, in response to the landing of the Allies in North Africa. By then we had escaped certain death and had arrived safely in Ecuador, after our temporary stay in Madrid. The kind Jewish woman, Frau Fürst, who had taken care of me in Sète, while my mother was hospitalized in Montpellier, however, did not manage to escape.

There is no doubt that a conjunction of luck, circumstance and decisive action resulted in our eventual escape from death at the hands of the Nazi assassins. However, the more I reflect on the sequence of events that allowed our survival, the more I am surprised of the unlikely and happy outcome.

I had received a personal letter from Marshall Pétain, dated “Noël 1940”, i.e., Christmas 1940, congratulating me for my drawing that garnered a prize among first graders in the Languedoc region of the Vichy France region under his Nazi-collaborating regime. The degree of Pétain’s antisemitism has long been a matter of post-war debate. In 2010, however, a disturbing piece of evidence surfaced. The great Marshall had hardened with hand written amendments the original French state decree defining the status of Jews in October 1940. The original intention was to exclude from these oppressive rules those who were French-born Jews. Pétain thus amended the decree specifying that all Jews, regardless of their origin, were to be prohibited from exercising a number of professions, among them teaching, performing government functions, membership in the military, etc. It is therefore astonishing that he saw fit to praise a little boy of Jewish extraction within two months of the issue of such decrees. Senility – he was an octogenarian at the time – could have been the reasonfor his inattention which may have saved us from potential identification and subsequent persecution.

As to the attitude of the countryside French population towards Marshall Pétain during at least the initial two years of his tenure as head of the Vichy government, it is enlightening to read the memoirs of Léon Werth, Deposition 1940-1944. While the French gradually became disenchanted, if not outraged, at the collaboration with Germany, many continued to admire the Marshall and to believe that he would, ultimately, be their savior. At the end of the war, however, Pétain was put on trial for treason and condemned to death. De Gaulle commuted his sentence to life imprisonment and he died in 1951, at the age of 95.

Further, and even more surprisingly, the U.S. administration and military, throughout World War ll, tried to maintain good relations and negotiate with the Vichy regime with the purported objective to turn it against the German Nazi occupiers. This, in the face of the active collaboration with the Nazis by the Pétain government as well as its overt antisemitism. Roosevelt, apparently, disagreed vehemently with de Gaulle about the intransigence of the latter as he rejected any rapprochement towards the Vichy ‘traitors’, as he appropriately labelled them, while he took refuge in England (see “De Gaulle” by Julian Jackson). Both Canada and the U.S. maintained diplomatic relations with Vichy France until November, 1942 when the Germans occupied all of France.