One Day in France

Tragedy and Betrayal in an Occupied Village

Jean-Marie Borzeix, Gay McAuley, Gay McAuley

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780857728685
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

April 6, 1944. A detachment of German soldiers arrive in a rural French town, hunting down resistance fighters, many of whom are hiding in the region. More than sixty years later, the villagers clearly remember the day when four peasants from a nearby village were taken hostage and shot as an example to others. But do they remember the whole story? Jean-Marie Borzeix sets out to investigate the events of Holy Thursday 1944, and to reveal the hidden truths of that fateful day. He uncovers the story of a mysterious 'fifth man' shot alongside the resisters and eventually unravels a trail which leads him to Paris, Israel and into the darkest corners of the Holocaust in France. A captivating story, the events of this day in a small, entirely typical, town illuminate the true impact of World War II in France.

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JEAN-MARIE BORZEIX is a journalist, writer and broadcaster. He began his career as a reporter writing for Combat and the Quotidien de Paris before becoming Editor-in-Chief of Les Nouvelles Littéraires and Literary Editor for Éditions du Seuil. From 1984 to 1997 he was Director of the prestigious public radio channel France Culture and later, Special Advisor to the President of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

GAY MCAULEY is a French theatre specialist who has played a leading role in the development of performance studies in Australia. She is a distinguished research fellow in Theatre Studies at Royal Holloway College, University of London and Honorary Associate Professor in Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Sydney.

CAROLINE MOOREHEAD is the author of many books including Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France and A Train in Winter: A Story of Resistance, Friendship and Survival in Auschwitz.

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‘A completely enthralling and disturbing account of a forgotten episode during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II. An exceptional and moving work of historical investigation.’

William Boyd

‘The distant sounds from neighbouring hamlets, the suspicions, the waiting for bad news, the secret flights along paths unknown to the military, the explosions and then silence once more, heavy, unbearable… Jean-Marie Borzeix has pulled off an extraordinary feat.’

Bernard Pivot

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Published in 2016 by
I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
London • New York
www.ibtauris.com

Copyright © Éditions Stock, 2008, 2016 Jean-Marie Borzeix
Copyright translation and translator’s note © Gay McAuley
Copyright foreword © Caroline Moorehead

The right of Jean-Marie Borzeix to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions.

References to websites were correct at the time of writing.

ISBN: 978 1 78453 622 0
eISBN: 978 0 85772 868 5
ePDF: 978 0 85772 833 3

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

Text design, typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London

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For Noémie and Valérian

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We must not be concerned exclusively with the present,
but also with the succeeding years.

C.-F. Ramuz, Diary, April 1904

The greatest defeat, in all things, is to forget…

L.-F. Céline,
Journey to the End of the Night, 1932

Write and preserve!

Simon Dubnow, Riga Ghetto, 1941

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Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword by Caroline Moorehead

Preface

L’Echameil

Haute-Corrèze, 6 April 1944

Living Testimony

Haute-Corrèze, Autumn 2001

Flashback

Poland, Belgium, France, Israel, 1910–2001

Minus One

Haute-Corrèze, Autumn 2001–Winter 2002

The Fractured Past

Haute-Corrèze, Summer 1999; Haifa, Winter 2001–2002

Jem

Haute-Corrèze, Autumn 2002

The Future of the Past

Fort de Charenton, Tulle, Paris, Limoges, 2003

Jewish Easter

Haute-Corrèze, 6 April 1944

A Beautiful Summer

Haute-Corrèze, 13–14 July 2004

From One Memorial to Another

Paris, Haute-Corrèze, Berlin, Winter 2004–Summer 2007

Fifty Years Later

Postscript to the English edition

Final Note from the Translator

Notes

Appendix

Plates

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‌List of Illustrations

Maps

Occupied France, 1940–5.

Bugeat and environs.

Plates

‌1. The village of Bugeat around the middle of the twentieth century.

‌2. Bugeat today: the church and mairie.

‌3. The Grand Hôtel de Paris in Bugeat.

‌4. Church and cemetery at L’Église-aux-Bois.

‌5. The plaque left on the grave of Chaim Rozent.

‌6. Malka Rozent and friends at the grave, 1945.

‌7. Inscription by Malka (Marie) Rozent on the back of this photograph.

‌8. Lucie Fribourg and her husband Albert.

‌9. Carola Hoch with her son Bernard.

‌10. André Drouaine.

‌11. Prewar portrait of Chaim Rozent, Antwerp.

‌12. Chaim Rozent working as a hairdresser, Antwerp.

‌13. Chaim Rozent playing his violin at an event in Antwerp, probably 1936.

‌14. Chaim and Malka Rozent with their daughters, probably in Limoges, 1943.

‌15. Malka Rozent and an unknown woman with Shifra, Hanna and baby Chaim, in Pérols in 1945.

‌16. Resistance fighters from Bugeat and the vicinity, 1944.

‌17. Victory parade of maquisards in Bugeat, 1944.

‌18. Memorial plaque on wall of mairie, Bugeat.

‌19. Family gathering at the grave of Chaim Rozent, September 2015.

The nature of these images makes it impossible in most cases to credit the photographers. Grateful thanks to members of the victims’ families, notably the Rozent family in Israel, Daniel Wagner, Renée and Myriam Schwartz, Henry Fribourg and Jean-Bernard Hoch, who have authorised the reproduction of some of their precious photographs, rare traces of the lives that were so brutally extinguished.

Photographs of Bugeat during the war and earlier were generously provided by Pierre Fournet, Yves Orliange and Jean-Yves Urbain, and Barry Thomas kindly took photographs of Bugeat today. The photograph of Malka Rozent by her husband’s grave in 1945 was discovered only in 2015 by Jean-Louis Beynat when sorting his late grandfather’s papers, a perfect example of the way information about the past is continually coming to light.

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Occupied France, 1940–5

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Bugeat and environs

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‌Foreword

On 8 November 1942, British and American forces landed in North Africa. Three days later, just as it grew light, the Wehrmacht, fearing an Allied landing on France’s Mediterranean coast, crossed the demarcation line that had previously separated the German-held north from the Vichy south and occupied the whole country. From that moment on, no one was safe: not the Resistance, whose numbers were increasing all the time and who had found security of a kind in the previously unoccupied zone; not ordinary people suspected of anti-German and anti-Vichy sentiments; and certainly not the Jews.

From now until the Liberation of France in the summer of 1944, some nineteen months later, villages, hamlets, towns, remote country areas everywhere were subject to rafles, round-ups, whether of hostages to shoot in reprisal for attacks on German soldiers, or of Jews, to be deported to the death camps in Poland. One Day in France, like a Greek tragedy, is the account of what happened on a single day in the spring of 1944, 6 April, on one small plateau in the Corrèze in central France, when a group of SS soldiers with their death’s head insignia descended on the area. This is history viewed through a magnifying glass, using one forgotten event in one place to tell the story of what the French call les années noires, the dark and terrifying years of German occupation and French collaboration.

Jean-Marie Borzeix is a distinguished and successful cultural journalist and editor, and the former director of France’s prestigious public radio channel, France Culture. In 2001, he found himself travelling repeatedly between Paris and the small market town of Bugeat, which lies some 200 kilometres south-west of Clermont-Ferrand, just north of Brive, in order to visit his father, who was ill. Borzeix himself is a native of the area, having been born in Bugeat in the summer of 1941. It was just near here, in the little village of L’Echameil, that the tragic events which he describes in One Day in France took place.

Borzeix’s tale follows three separate strands, each entwined with the other, one story feeding into another, but all with a slightly different background. What started as a journalist’s simple curiosity, the desire to discover more about the war in the Corrèze, spread bit by bit as he learned more, and saw how hard it was to unearth facts long left buried. His first thought was to seek out and interview the survivors and their descendants: interviewing, as he once said, was in his journalist blood. Soon, however, he found himself faced with great gaps in knowledge and memory, holes in the story that could only be plugged through deeper archival research. He turned to the excellent departmental and national libraries of which France is justly proud. But by now he had also been bitten by another bug, something very familiar to the French, a fascination with the process of memory itself, what is recalled and how, and what is lost and why, and this too he decided to weave into the narrative of his book.

By the spring of 1944, when the story at the heart of One Day in France begins, plans were already being finalised for the invasion and liberation of France, in which the Resistance and the maquis, hiding out in the mountainous areas of central and southern France, intended to play a major role. Across the Limousin and the Haute-Loire, for many miles all around Bugeat and L’Echameil, there were some fourteen different groups of maquisards, gathered under three overarching umbrellas: that of the Gaullist Armée Secrète, that of the Mouvements Unis de la Résistance, and that of the fighting arm of the communist Francs-Tireurs et Partisans Français. Many of these young maquisards were local boys, evading the draft of the Service du Travail Obligatoire, the STO, under which young Frenchmen were dispatched to Germany to help the war industry. They spent their nights high in the mountains, in hiding, and were provisioned by their families in the villages and hamlets below, or by men and women known as the ‘legals’, who pursued ordinary lives, with ordinary occupations on the surfac...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• L’Echameil • Haute-Corrèze, 6 April 1944
• Living Testimony • Haute-Corrèze, Autumn 2001
• Flashback • Poland, Belgium, France, Israel, 1910–2001
• Minus One • Haute-Corrèze, Autumn 2001–Winter 2002
• The Fractured Past • Haute-Corrèze, Summer 1999; Haifa, Winter 2001–2002
• Jem • Haute-Corrèze, Autumn 2002
• The Future of the Past • Fort de Charenton, Tulle, Paris, Limoges, 2003
• Jewish Easter • Haute-Corrèze, 6 April 1944
• A Beautiful Summer • Haute-Corrèze, 13–14 July 2004
• From One Memorial to Another • Paris, Haute-Corrèze, Berlin, Winter 2004–Summer 2007
• Fifty Years Later
• Postscript to the English Edition
• Final Note from the Translator
• Notes
• Appendix
• Plates