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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 LittĂŠraires and Literary Editor for Ăditions 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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âA 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.â
William Boyd
âThe 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.â
Bernard Pivot
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Published in 2016 by
I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
London ⢠New York
www.ibtauris.com
Copyright Š Ăditions Stock, 2008, 2016 Jean-Marie Borzeix
Copyright translation and translatorâs note Š Gay McAuley
Copyright foreword Š 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 NoĂŠmie and ValĂŠrian
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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 forgetâŚ
L.-F. CĂŠline,
Journey to the End of the Night, 1932
Simon Dubnow, Riga Ghetto, 1941
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Contents
List of Illustrations
Foreword by Caroline Moorehead
Preface
LâEchameil
Haute-Corrèze, 6 April 1944
Living Testimony
Haute-Corrèze, Autumn 2001
Flashback
Poland, Belgium, France, Israel, 1910â2001
Minus One
Haute-Corrèze, Autumn 2001âWinter 2002
The Fractured Past
Haute-Corrèze, Summer 1999; Haifa, Winter 2001â2002
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, 13â14 July 2004
From One Memorial to Another
Paris, Haute-Corrèze, Berlin, Winter 2004âSummer 2007
Fifty Years Later
Postscript to the English edition
Final Note from the Translator
Notes
Appendix
Plates
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âList of Illustrations
Maps
Occupied France, 1940â5.
Bugeat and environs.
Plates
â1. The village of Bugeat around the middle of the twentieth century.
â2. Bugeat today: the church and mairie.
â3. The Grand HĂ´tel de Paris in Bugeat.
â4. Church and cemetery at LâĂglise-aux-Bois.
â5. The plaque left on the grave of Chaim Rozent.
â6. Malka Rozent and friends at the grave, 1945.
â7. Inscription by Malka (Marie) Rozent on the back of this photograph.
â8. Lucie Fribourg and her husband Albert.
â9. Carola Hoch with her son Bernard.
â10. AndrĂŠ Drouaine.
â11. Prewar portrait of Chaim Rozent, Antwerp.
â12. Chaim Rozent working as a hairdresser, Antwerp.
â13. Chaim Rozent playing his violin at an event in Antwerp, probably 1936.
â14. Chaim and Malka Rozent with their daughters, probably in Limoges, 1943.
â15. Malka Rozent and an unknown woman with Shifra, Hanna and baby Chaim, in PĂŠrols in 1945.
â16. Resistance fighters from Bugeat and the vicinity, 1944.
â17. Victory parade of maquisards in Bugeat, 1944.
â18. Memorial plaque on wall of mairie, Bugeat.
â19. 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 victimsâ families, notably the Rozent family in Israel, Daniel Wagner, RenĂŠe 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 husbandâs grave in 1945 was discovered only in 2015 by Jean-Louis Beynat when sorting his late grandfatherâs papers, a perfect example of the way information about the past is continually coming to light.
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Occupied France, 1940â5
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âForeword
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 Franceâs 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 deathâs 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 annĂŠes 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 Franceâs 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 LâEchameil, that the tragic events which he describes in One Day in France took place.
Borzeixâs 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 journalistâs 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 LâEchameil, there were some fourteen different groups of maquisards, gathered under three overarching umbrellas: that of the Gaullist ArmĂŠe Secrète, that of the Mouvements Unis de la RĂŠsistance, 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 âlegalsâ, who pursued ordinary lives, with ordinary occupations on the surfac...