In France, an Apology to Jews for WWII

On the spot where tens of thousands of French Jews were warehoused before being shipped off to the ovens of Nazi Germany, bishops of France’s Roman Catholic Church asked Tuesday, in a landmark announcement, to be forgiven for not having done more to oppose the Holocaust.

“We beseech the pardon of God and ask the Jewish people to hear this word of repentance,” the bishops said in a declaration read out at the site of the wartime Drancy transit camp near Paris.

The Catholic leaders said that until Vatican reforms begun in 1962 under Pope John XXIII, an “anti-Jewish tradition” sullied to a certain extent their church’s doctrine, teaching, preaching and liturgy, and that this helped provide fertile ground for the “venomous plant of hatred for Jews.”

The public act of contrition, signed by bishops in the Paris area and other dioceses where Jews were interned during World War II, was the first collective admission by leaders of the French church that their wartime counterparts did far too little to protest the anti-Semitic acts and policies of the German occupiers and their allies in the Vichy regime.

The attitude of most church dignitaries at the time was probably summed up by the late Cardinal Pierre Gerlier, wartime archbishop of Lyons, who, referring to Vichy leader Marshal Phillipe Petain, said: “Petain is France, and France is Petain.”

The Catholic hierarchy kept silent 57 years ago this week when Vichy passed the first in a long series of anti-Semitic measures: the law of Oct. 3, 1940, barring Jews from elected office, positions of responsibility in the civil service, the judiciary and the armed forces, and culturally influential jobs such as teaching in public schools, working as newspaper editors or reporters and directing movies or radio programs.

It was the first step in an odious process that eventually led to the mass deportation of 79,000 Jews, only 3,000 of whom returned alive, according to Henri Amouroux, France’s foremost historian of the Occupation.

“Before the scale of the drama and the unheard-of character of the crime, too many pastors, by their silence, offended the church itself and its mission,” the bishops said. “Today, we confess that this silence was a transgression.”

The timing of the clerics’ declaration was intended to recall the first of the discriminatory Vichy laws. The venue, a working-class housing development about six miles north of Paris now occupied by immigrant families, was one of the most sinister wartime locales in the country. The four-story U-shaped complex at Drancy was first used to house Communists and captured British soldiers and then, in August 1941, became an internment camp.

From March 1942 until the Liberation in August 1944, the barbed-wire-ringed camp was the “antechamber of death” for many French and foreign-born Jews. Detainees were commonly taken by bus to the railroad station in Le Bourget, then loaded onto cattle cars from a platform normally used to assemble sheep for the slaughterhouse.

According to Serge Klarsfeld, author of a history of the wartime ordeal of French Jewry, 63,300 Jews, including 10,000 children, were shipped from railroad stations around Drancy to the Nazi concentration camps. Only 2,245 returned.

The Drancy camp was run by French collaborators until July 1943, when a German took charge.

Speaking at the Tuesday evening ceremony, which took place before a railroad freight car like those used in the death convoys, Henri Hadjenberg, president of the Representative Council of the Jewish Institutions of France, hailed the bishops’ expression of contrition as a powerful weapon against the “still-threatening beast” of anti-Semitism and intolerance.

Another Jewish leader, however, earlier called the prelates’ declaration inexplicably “tardy.” Jean Kahn, president of the Central Hebrew Consistory of France, questioned why the Vatican has not come out with its own statement on anti-Semitism and the Holocaust promised by Pope John Paul II in 1987.

Father Jean Dujardin, secretary of the French bishops’ committee on relations with Judaism, said Tuesday that the statement demonstrates the church’s “engagement to change attitudes in a decisive and definitive manner.”

Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front--who once dismissed the existence of Nazi death camps as a “detail” of history--denounced the bishops’ plea as “absolutely scandalous.”

The bishop’s declaration is only the latest sign that a major effort is underway in France to come to grips with the complex legacy of World War II. In a week, Maurice Papon, a former Cabinet minister, is to become the first high-level official of the Vichy regime to be put on trial for alleged complicity in crimes against humanity.