The Deportation of Jews from France (Drancy and the Convoys)

From March 1942 to August 1944, France was, for nearly seventy-four thousand Jews, the point of departure for a journey of no return. Men, women and children — long-established French citizens or recent refugees — were arrested, interned, then loaded into wagons bound for the Reich's extermination centers, foremost among them Auschwitz-Birkenau. Fewer than three percent returned.

This Great Book follows the chain that led from law to death: legal exclusion, the roundups, internment at Drancy and in the camps of the Loiret, the organization of the convoys, arrival at Auschwitz, then the acts of resistance and rescue, and finally the long work of mourning and Memory. It draws on the documentary foundation established by Serge Klarsfeld, whose Mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France reconstructed, convoy by convoy, the identities of the deported.

Behind the numbers, faces. This account keeps present that of Aron Natanson, a Parisian bookseller, and his daughter Miryam, thirteen years old, arrested together and deported on convoy no. 37 of September 25, 1942 — a story transmitted by the historian Dominique Natanson on the site Mémoire Juive & Éducation, and to which this book owes a part of its human fabric. To write this history is to refuse that the number erase the name.

Persecution did not begin with violence, but with the law. As early as autumn 1940, without any German pressure compelling it to do so, the Vichy regime promulgated its first "Jewish statute" on October 3, 1940: it legally defined who was Jewish and barred them from public service, the military, education, the press, and cinema. A second statute, in June 1941, deepened the exclusion, ordered the registration of Jews and the "Aryanization" of their property — that is, their systematic dispossession. A Commissariat général aux questions juives was established to administer this exclusion.

In the occupied zone, German ordinances were layered on top of French law: registration as early as autumn 1940, the word juif stamped on identity papers, the marking of businesses, and then, in June 1942, the compulsory wearing of the yellow star for all Jews over the age of six. Two state apparatuses — the occupier and Vichy — thus converged toward the same end: to identify, isolate, and strip.

This legal architecture was not yet deportation, but it was its precondition. By registering individuals, filing their addresses, and distinguishing nationals from foreigners, the French administration assembled — without always grasping the full consequences — the lists that would make the roundups possible. The distinction between French Jews and foreign Jews initially directed the hunt toward the most vulnerable — the refugees from Central and Eastern Europe, often stateless, among whom was Aron Natanson, born in Romania.

The first major arrests targeted foreign Jewish men. In May 1941, the roundup known as the "green ticket" raid — named after the summons sent to those concerned — led several thousand of them to the camps of the Loiret. In August 1941, a roundup in the 11th arrondissement of Paris filled the camp of Drancy, which had just opened.

The summer of 1942 marked a turning point: the hunt extended to families. On July 16 and 17, the Vél d'Hiv roundup, carried out by the French police on German orders and with the approval of Vichy, arrested more than thirteen thousand people in Paris, including several thousand children. Single individuals and childless couples were sent to Drancy; families were crammed into the Vélodrome d'Hiver, without water or medical care, before being transferred to the camps of the Loiret. In the so-called free zone, the August 1942 roundups in turn handed over thousands of foreign Jews.

After the occupation of the southern zone in November 1942, and then the collapse of the Italian occupation zone in September 1943 — a relative refuge where the family of Lucien Natanson had taken shelter — the hunt continued until the final months of the war, in Marseille, in Nice and elsewhere, now often conducted directly by the German services. It was in this climate of manhunt that Aron Natanson and his daughter Miryam were arrested in Paris on September 23, 1942.

Between arrest and convoy lay internment. The camp at Drancy, an unfinished housing estate in the north-eastern suburbs of Paris, was its pivot: approximately sixty-three thousand of the deportees from France passed through it. Administered first by the French police, it came in July 1943 under the direct control of SS officer Aloïs Brunner, who accelerated its operations. Life there meant overcrowding, hunger and uncertainty, as inmates watched for the list of the next departure.

The camps of the Loiret — Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande — opened in 1941, initially held foreign men, then, after the Vél d'Hiv, entire families. It was there that one of the most harrowing scenes of the persecution unfolded: the separation of mothers from their children. By order, the adults were deported first; thousands of children, left alone for several weeks, were then transported to Drancy and on to Auschwitz. The camp at Compiègne-Royallieu, under German control, served for its part as a transit point for hostages, resistance members and Jews: it was from there that the very first convoy departed on 27 March 1942.

Drancy was the last French soil that Aron and Miryam Natanson walked upon. The site is today a memorial; the camps of the Loiret, long erased from the landscape, have regained a place in national Memory.

Approximately eighty convoys left France between March 27, 1942 and August 17, 1944. Nearly all departed from Drancy, with a few leaving from the camps of the Loiret, Compiègne, Angers, or Lyon. Each convoy most often carried one thousand people, locked in sealed cattle cars, for a journey of two to three days toward Upper Silesia.

It is to Serge Klarsfeld that we owe our detailed knowledge of these deportations. His Mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France (1978) reconstructed, convoy by convoy, the date, the point of departure, the destination, and, as far as possible, the name of each deportee. This painstaking work transformed an anonymous mass into a sum of identifiable lives. It also established the toll: nearly seventy-four thousand deportees, the vast majority of whom were gassed upon arrival, without even being registered; barely more than two thousand survivors in 1945.

Most of the convoys were bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau; a few, in the spring of 1943, toward Sobibor and Majdanek; another, in May 1944, toward Kaunas and Reval, in the Baltic countries. Convoy no. 37, which departed from Drancy on September 25, 1942, carrying one thousand and four people, counted among them Aron Natanson and his daughter Miryam. Upon arrival, eight hundred and seventy-three of them were immediately murdered; only fifteen survived the war.

At the end of the journey, the doors opened onto the ramp at Birkenau. There the selection took place: on one side, those — the majority: the elderly, women, children — sent directly to the gas chambers; on the other, a minority deemed fit for labor, registered, tattooed with a number, condemned to exhaustion. Miryam Natanson, thirteen years old, was not among those who were kept; her father died in the camp a few weeks later.

The Auschwitz complex brought together three functions. Auschwitz I, a concentration camp; Auschwitz II-Birkenau, both a camp and a killing center, equipped with gas chambers and crematoria designed for mass extermination; and finally Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a slave labor camp connected to the IG-Farben chemical plant. It was at Monowitz that Serge Smulevic was assigned — deported from Drancy in December 1943 and registered under the prisoner number 169922 — one of the few to return, and to bear witness.

To distinguish these functions is not an exercise in erudition: the concentration camp breaks and exploits; the killing center kills industrially, without delay. At Auschwitz, the two logics coexisted, separated by a few hundred meters and by the thin boundary of a selection. More than one million people, the vast majority of them Jewish, met their death there.

In the face of persecution, not everything was submission. Jews took up arms in the Resistance or in Jewish combat organizations; the young Lucien Natanson, a resistant, was shot by the Germans in the Isère in August 1944. Others organized rescue operations: networks, often supported by Jewish organizations such as the OSE, concealed thousands of children with families, in convents, and in boarding schools. Miryam Natanson herself was for a time hidden in Catholic institutions, before a return to her father's home led to her capture.

Many non-Jews also took part in this rescue effort — people honored by the State of Israel with the title of Righteous Among the Nations. The village of Chambon-sur-Lignon, in the Cévennes, offers the most celebrated example, but mutual aid was often the work of ordinary people — neighbors, schoolteachers, clergy, and simple passersby.

These acts of courage explain a paradox: although the deportations struck hard, approximately three-quarters of the Jews of France survived the war, a higher proportion than in most occupied countries. This massive rescue effort in no way erases the responsibility of those who organized the persecution; it serves only as a reminder that, even at the heart of disaster, individual conscience retained a margin for action.

In 1945, survivors were counted in the hundreds where tens of thousands had once departed. Many returned to find only emptiness: parents gone, homes occupied, belongings scattered. To the pain was long added silence — that of a society eager to forget and little inclined to listen.

Recognition was slow. It took the obstinate work of witnesses and historians for Memory to assert itself. Serge Klarsfeld, through the association Fils et Filles des déportés juifs de France, made the restitution of names the work of a lifetime. The belated trials of Klaus Barbie, Paul Touvier, and then Maurice Papon reopened the question of French complicity. In 1995, the President of the Republic solemnly acknowledged the responsibility of the French State in the persecution and deportation of its Jews.

Transmission also took more intimate paths. Survivors such as Serge Smulevic bore witness through word and drawing; descendants, like the historian Dominique Natanson, devoted websites and books to the memory of their own — Mémoire Juive & Éducation, online since 1997, stands as one of the earliest French examples. The former camps of Drancy, Pithiviers, and Compiègne have become memorials. Thus, little by little, the numbers have been repopulated with names.

The deportation of the Jews of France is contained in one figure — nearly seventy-four thousand — and in as many singular stories. The work of Serge Klarsfeld, in restoring to each one their name, has shown the way: against the anonymity into which extermination sought to dissolve its victims, to remember is to name.

This Great Book has followed the thread that runs from the law of exclusion to the sealed cattle car, then from the gas chamber to the long labor of Memory. It has done so by keeping present a few faces among the multitude: Aron Natanson and his daughter Miryam, taken by convoy no. 37 and never returned; Lucien Natanson, fallen arms in hand; Serge Smulevic, who came back from Monowitz to bear witness. Their memory reaches us notably through the patient work of transmission carried out by the Natanson family, on the site Mémoire Juive & Éducation.

To write their History is not merely to recall a crime: it is to honor a promise — the one the survivors made to the vanished, and that each generation must take up anew — to remember, so that it may never happen again.