LONDON — On the morning of June 23, 1940, 12-year-old Ninette Dreyfus’s family learned that Hitler had forced France into a humiliating armistice the previous evening.
Her father’s reaction to the news was visceral and physical. Edgar Dreyfus collapsed on the stairs, suffering an asthma attack and struggling to breathe. “I had never seen him show weakness before. For a moment, I feared he was going to die,” Ninette later recalled. “The whole world of my childhood was falling apart.”
But unbeknownst to Ninette, her father, or France’s Jews, much worse was to come.
Released in paperback in the UK on January 22, “Ninette’s War: A Jewish Story of Survival in 1940s France” tells the remarkable wartime odyssey of one of France’s most prominent Jewish families — and the Vichy regime’s knowing complicity in the Nazis’ crimes.
The story has been painstakingly pieced together — like “restoring a mosaic” — by British journalist John Jay, drawing on Ninette’s youthful diary entries, family papers, and interviews she gave to the author in the years before her death in 2021.
As Jay makes clear, Edgar’s reaction to news of the armistice did not reflect a sense of foreboding about the likely fate awaiting his family.
“He was completely dumbfounded that the mighty French army could collapse in the way that it had done,” he tells The Times of Israel. “French Jews at that point had no idea of what subsequently was going to hit them.”
Jay’s book tracks Edgar’s growing sense of disbelief and horror at Vichy’s brutal betrayal of France’s Jews.
The Dreyfus family — second only in influence to the Rothschilds in Parisian Jewish society — were, Jay says, a “classic cosmopolitan, Jewish Western European family, a mixture of Bohemians, Germans and Frenchmen.”
They were also fiercely patriotic and loyal to the French state, which, by and large, had treated French Jewry well. Edgar ran a bank owned by the family firm, La Maison, which had provided loans to help France’s war effort after 1914. A decade later, Edgar acceded to the government’s request to help fight off an inflation-induced run on the franc. He was made an officer of the Légion d’honneur in recognition of his services.
In their grand 16th arrondissement townhouse — which had once been owned by composer Claude Debussy — Ninette, her elder sister Viviane and parents Edgar and Yvonne lived a life of plenty and privilege. The family were secular and, until the outbreak of war, Ninette barely knew what being a Jew was. Occasional antisemitic playground slurs had little meaning for her.
nd slurs had little meaning for her.
Life as an ‘exode’
Hitler’s May 1940 blitzkrieg against France changed all that. One month later, with the sound of artillery growing closer and German forces crossing the Seine, the Dreyfus family joined the “exode” — one of the largest movements of people in history — as 6 million people took to the roads to flee the Nazi advance, among them some 100,000 to 200,000 Jews.
After a three-week, 1,700-kilometer (roughly 1,050-mile) journey via Nantes, Bordeaux and Perpignan, Ninette and her family arrived in Marseille, where they took up residence in a hotel full of fellow exodians and Jews.
Already, the poisonous atmosphere caused by France’s defeat and humiliation had sparked a wave of antisemitism. Nonetheless, even as they traveled through Perpignan close to the Spanish border, Edgar, who had ties to the new Francoist regime, did not attempt to flee France.
The Riviera fell under the non-occupied “Free Zone,” which was governed from Vichy by the World War I hero Marshal Philippe Pétain. As Jay details, there was little to suggest Pétain — a onetime supporter of Alfred Dreyfus — harbored antisemitic inclinations. Indeed, alongside members of the International League Against Antisemitism, Edgar’s cousin, Louis, a senator, voted to grant Pétain authoritarian powers soon after the armistice.
But Pétain swiftly promoted antisemites to lead his new regime, creating a “permissive environment for antisemitism to flourish,” says Jay. In October 1940, the first antisemitic legislation barred Jews from certain professions, including teaching, journalism and the civil service, while sharply curtailing their role in the medical and legal professions. At Montgrand, Marseille’s grandest girls’ school, Ninette’s math teacher, Odette Valabrègue, was fired. Like the chief rabbi and French communal organizations, Edgar clung to the importance of the rule of law, even if the publication of now-infamous images of Pétain shaking hands with Hitler at Montoire in October 1940 led him to weep.
Petain shakes hands with Hitler, October 1940
Any lingering illusions about Pétain ended with the passage of further, sweeping antisemitic legislation in 1941, which, in a sharp break with the Third Republic’s avowed secularism, required Jews to register in a special census and expanded the list of professions, including banking, closed to them. The measures, which forced Edgar to relinquish his role as chief executive of La Maison, came as a “personal hammer blow,” writes Jay.
“Pétain’s first statute drove his friends from public service and the media and limited their participation in law and medicine, but he was not directly affected,” he says. “Now, Pétain was depriving him of his career and driving his family into a legal ghetto.”
Ninette later captured the psychological impact of the measures on her father, recalling: “Work was everything to Daddy, and it was torture for him to contemplate life without work.” Nor was the future much brighter for Edgar’s daughters, with university places and professional work all but closed to Jews.
The legal assault, the establishment of the new Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives, which began to plunder Jewish wealth, and the promotion of antisemitism in the media were accompanied by, and fed, rising Jew-hate on the streets. Ninette’s family heard the thud of the bomb that exploded in Marseille’s synagogue in May 1941.
Ninette and father at Cannes beach, 1942
Joining the resistance
No longer needing to be in Marseille, where La Maison had offices, Edgar moved his family to Cannes, which, although no less antisemitic, was filled with family and friends. Their new home, Villa Rochelongue, was a Belle-Époque seafront house near the Palm Beach Casino staffed with butlers and a cook, cleaner and gardener. Despite the war and food rationing — which led the family to keep a cow and rabbits — life “felt like the old Côte d’Azur,” says Jay. When not obsessing over her upcoming 15th birthday, Ninette penned diary entries about clothes, accessories and cosmetics, ballet, cinema trips, school and social life, sailing in the baie de Cannes, and her “passion” for football and volleyball.
Although somewhat cocooned by her parents, Ninette was not oblivious to the pernicious forces imperiling Vichy’s Jews. Her school headteacher, Marcelle Capron, was a résistante who later sheltered Jews and helped them flee. However, the school had its share of antisemitic teachers and pupils. Ninette, a self-described tomboy, fought girls who were members of Avant-Garde, the Pétainist youth movement.
Edgar, too, chose to resist, crossing what his daughter termed a “personal Rubicon” in spring 1943 by refusing to obey an order requiring all Jews to have the word “Juif” stamped in their ID and ration cards. While most French Jews followed their communal leaders’ advice to continue obeying Vichy’s laws, Edgar’s decision was, Ninette said, “the most significant moment of the war.”
“He was defining himself as an outlaw, no easy decision for a man in late middle age with teenage daughters and a position in society,” she said. Decades later, Ninette discovered files in France’s Archives Nationales revealing that he been denounced, triggering a police investigation. Six months late, Edgar led his family to the mairie to have their papers stamped.
Both Edgar — who joined a coastal reception committee for a Royal Navy boat carrying British agents and collecting résistants — and Vivian began to engage in secret resistance activities.
However, perhaps the most powerful example of the family’s resistance came in its evolving relationship to Judaism. As the atmosphere darkened, Yvonne recognized her daughters would be more resilient in the face of societal antisemitism if they felt pride in their heritage. She taught them that they should be both proud of Jews’ traditions and achievements, and recognize that with success came a responsibility to those in need. Those lessons bore fruit. Ninette remembered that her reaction to having her ID stamped with “Juif” was not one of humiliation, but pride.
“My parents became more interested in Judaism,” Ninette recalled. “Others ran away; we moved closer.” During Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in 1942, Edgar and his wife and children attended services for the first time since participating in family bat mitzvahs in the 1930s. “For Mummy and Daddy,” Ninette believed, “taking part in a service after decades of non-observance was an act of defiance.”
However, back in Paris, which was occupied by the Germans, tragedy was enveloping members of the family — including Edgar’s sisters, Louise and Alice, Alice’s daughter, Maryse, and her husband, disabled veteran André Schoenfeld. André, a holder of the Croix de guerre and Légion d’honneur, was arrested in 1941 by French police at a reunion dinner for World War I wounded and sent to the notorious Drancy internment camp.
News of André’s arrest hit Edgar and his family hard. “Nothing would ever be the same again,” believed Vivianne; France was treating its Jews as “abject rot, putrid larvae to be crushed.” The family also learned of the horrors which had unfolded during the Val d’Hiv roundup in July 1942, when some 8,000 Jews, almost 4,000 of whom were children, were held together in the sports arena in appallingly overcrowded conditions for five days before being deported. “It is horrible, demonic, something that grabs you round the throat so you can’t cry out,” a letter from an eyewitness, a social worker, circulating on the Riviera revealed. “I’ll try to describe what it looks like, but if you multiply whatever you understand by 1,000, it will still be only part of the reality.”
But, even at this moment, elements of the family’s past life continued: That August, Edgar took his family on holiday to Mont-Revard’s Grand Hôtel, a luxury Alpine retreat they had visited before the war. In her diary, Ninette recorded she had “a fantastic time” riding horses and playing tennis, croquet, golf and ping-pong.
As Jay says, it is important to note that the family was “in ignorance of a lot of what was going on in the north and … didn’t know what was happening once the transports [took] people to the east.” As late as 1943, most exodians, he suggests, believed that forced labor was the worst fate awaiting French Jews. When two Auschwitz escapees, Haïm Salomon and M. Honig, returned to Nice looking for their families and detailed the horrors they had witnessed to a local Jewish committee, their testimony was dismissed. The men, it was decided, must have lost their minds, with one of Edgar’s prewar friends, who chaired the committee, telling a colleague: “Such atrocities… are not conceivable… in the middle of the 20th century.”
Marseilles 1941
However, even as a series of Allied victories in 1942 pointed to defeat for the Nazis, it was clear that the danger had by no means passed. Indeed, for the family, the moment of maximum peril came in autumn 1943 when the Germans occupied the Riviera and, to prevent it from deserting the Axis, invaded Italy.
Going into hiding
Having acquired false identification papers forged by a former employee of La Maison, Edgar, his wife and daughters traveled by train from Cannes to Marseille and then onto Pau, close to the Pyrenees. “It was exciting to hold those false papers,” Ninette recalled. “I felt like a character in a book.”
Their escape highlights that, amid the betrayals and collaboration perpetrated by Vichy and its friends, there were also those who attempted to assist their fellow Jewish citizens. As the Germans searched for Edgar, the family’s neighbors in Cannes provided them with shelter.
In Pau, Pierre Barthe, a horse breeder who knew the family, hid them in his villa while hatching the audacious plan that would see them safely guided across the mountains to Spain by Henri Delhiart, one of the Pyrénées’ great smugglers. The escape was hardly without incident. Barthe purloined an ambulance and had Ninette pose as a tuberculosis patient to speed their passage to the French spa town Cambo-les-Bains, where Delhiart took the reins. He chose a bar frequented by German border guards as their rendezvous point, correctly calculating, as Jay writes, that “the one place Germans would not suspect as a starting point for an evasion would be their own watering hole.” And Ninette remembered later hiding in a ditch from Germans troops who passed so close that she felt as if their dogs were breathing on her. Luckily, as Delhiart had planned, the wet night ensured the dogs couldn’t pick up her scent.
After reaching the safety of Spain, the family spent the final months of the war lodging at Madrid’s luxurious Palace Hotel, socializing with Anglophile monarchists and dodging the attentions of German spies and fascist sympathizers.
In April 1945, nearly five years after her departure, Ninette returned to Paris. But the occupation had shattered the family forever. As they slowly discovered, André and Maryse were murdered at Auschwitz in August 1943. With her possessions and property expropriated by the Nazis, Aunt Louise died alone in her attic room in Paris in May 1943, while, alongside 327 children, Aunt Alice was deported to Auschwitz four weeks before the city’s liberation.
Later in life, Ninette worked to ensure that those who had helped the family were recognized. Thanks to her efforts, in 1980 Yad Vashem declared Barthe and his wife Righteous Among the Nations.
But she would never shake the feeling that French Jews had been betrayed by their own.
“Her disdain for her countrymen was even greater than her abhorrence of German Nazis,” Jay writes. “The Germans were foreigners; the French were her people, yet they had turned their backs on her and worse during the years in which she came of age.”
https://www.timesofisrael.com/nazi-era-teen-girls-diary-charts-unraveling-of-france-and-her-prominent-jewish-family/
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