This summer, I received a grant from the University Scholars Program to travel to Paris to conduct research on the lives of Holocaust survivors in France. My research was informed by visits to the Mémorial de la Shoah (the Holocaust memorial and museum in Paris), interviews with French Holocaust survivors, audiovisual survivor testimonies, as well as autobiographical survivor memoirs. 

At the onset of the German Occupation of France in June 1940, the Jewish population in Metropolitan France was composed of approximately 330,000 individuals. Two distinct groups comprised this population; 200,000 individuals were French citizens, while the remaining 130,000 were foreigners fleeing their home countries already invaded by the Nazis. Of the 200,000 Jews holding French citizenship, half had been residing in France for multiple generations, and were classified as les Israélites. The other half included naturalized immigrants and their native-born children.

Under the collaboration of France’s Vichy government with the Nazi regime during World War II, it is estimated that 75,721 Jews were deported from France. Approximately 11,000 were children, 2,000 of whom were less than 6 years old. Only 2,564 deportees from France survived the war and returned from the camps. Although France represents one of countries with the highest survival rates of Jews during the Holocaust, it is nonetheless important to remember the lives of the individuals who were deported to concentration camps and murdered as a direct result of the collaboration of France’s Vichy government with the Nazi regime.

Following the liberation of the camps, French deportees returning “home” were subjected to harsh realities in numerous regards. Upon their return, many Jews discovered that their apartments, businesses, and possessions had been expropriated by the Nazis or sold to non-Jewish French civilians. Not only were the deportees forced to grapple with the immense psychological trauma resulting from their grueling experiences in the camps and the loss of their loved ones, but in addition, many of them were now left with no choice other than to rebuild their lives from the ground up, with absolutely nothing in hand. The Holocaust survivors’ ability to reconstruct their lives under such unimaginable circumstances serves as the ultimate representation of determination and resilience in the face of adversity.