Research Catalog

Not the Germans alone : a son's search for the truth of Vichy

Title: Not the Germans alone : a son's search for the truth of Vichy / Isaac Levendel ; with a foreword by Robert O. Paxton.
Author: Lewendel, Isaac, 1936-
Publication: Evanston, Ill. : Northwestern University Press, 1999.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	DS135.F9 L487 1999	Off-site

Details

Description

xvi, 341 pages; 24 cm

Summary

On June 5, 1944, the eve of D-day, Isaac Levendel's mother left the cherry farm in southern France where she and her son, not quite eight years old, had gone to escape the Nazis for what was to be a brief visit to their home to pick up the last of their belongings. She never returned. For more than forty years Isaac Levendel remained silent about, and tormented by, her disappearance. Finally, in 1990, he began to look for answers.
In this book, Levendel recounts his struggle to accept his mother's death and his search through secret government archives for her killers.
What he found shocked him. For decades Levendel believed that the Germans had taken his mother away. In fact, the archives contained evidence of widespread French collaboration with the Nazis, much of it not required of them but rather carried out willingly. The collaborators included both respected government officials who prepared deportation lists and members of a Marseille gang who arrested Jews - including Levendel's mother - and sold them to the Nazis.
This book details this horrible complicity and is steeped in Levendel's anger toward those who participated. But there were also those who helped the young Isaac - sometimes at great risk to themselves - after his mother disappeared, and Levendel remembers them here as well. His search for the truth of his past reunited him with several of these people, and his gratitude also is palpable.

Subjects

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (p. 327-341).

Contents

He Who ... -- 1. The Cherry Season -- 2. The Waltz of Names -- 3. Inside My Little Circle -- 4. Marechal, Here We Are! -- 5. The "Foreign" Jews of 1942 -- 6. Les Francais parlent aux Francais -- 7. David and Goliath -- 8. He Is Not Like the Rest of Us -- 9. Claire -- 10. The Steltzers -- 11. He Who Saves One Single Life ... -- 12. The Liberation -- 13. Back to the Steltzers -- 14. The Soldier's Tale -- 15. Back to Normal -- 16. The Family Souret -- 17. In My Mother's Shoes -- 18. A Souret or a Lewendel? -- 19. It's Hard to Be a Jew -- In the Meantime ... -- 20. Do Not Turn Around -- 21. "Political" Deportee Number 23925 -- 22. Close Calls -- 23. The Train of Memory -- 24. "The Germans Did It!" -- 25. The "Papon" of Avignon -- 26. The Victim and the Hangman All in One -- 27. The Cherry Farm -- 28. The French Connection -- 29. The Anatomy of National Amnesia.

ISBN

0810116634 (alk. paper)

LCCN

99019628

OCLC

ocm40813461

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries