Epilogue and Conclusion

Summary

There is a brief epilogue that discusses President Jacques Chirac’s 1995 address at the Vél d’hiv memorial site, in which he acknowledged the French state’s complicity in the implementation of the Final Solution. I interpret the speech and subsequent developments which enshrined the idea that France was nation of Justes (a handful of misérables apart) as an effort to incorporate the Shoah itself into a national narrative with a neo-Gaullist inflection. I just sketch in the idea. As much as I admire Lanzmann’s movie, I didn’t want the reader to think that the history of deportation memory ended there.

In the conclusion, I return to the questions raised at the outset, the most important ones having to do with resistant-centered concentrationary memory and the purported silence about the fate of the Jews. In my view, the received wisdom on these issues, although not altogether wrong, is misleading in several respects. From the outset, the Deportation and how it was remembered were politicized phenomena, generating competing narratives and a fragmentation of memory (concentrationary memory was never as unified as it is often said to have been). Jews joined in the fracas, once again right from the outset, but they positioned themselves as one voice among many, not as the dominant voice. And everywhere, in the first postwar decades, religion—whether Catholic or Jewish—and religious forms shaped the ways in which the Deportation was represented. Indeed, Catholics and Jews entered into dialogue in these early years about the Jews’ special fate, an exchange that was often painful and tense but that over time enabled a level of mutual understanding, all the while bringing the reality of the genocide to public attention and this well before the Six Day War or even the Eichmann trial. In one critical respect, I do not propose to alter received wisdom: the Jewish side of the story gained in strength with the passage of time. It was not turning points like 1961 or 1967, however, that proved decisive so much as processes: interfaith dialogue and the openings it created for Jews to make themselves heard and generational shift which injected a new and transformative note of militancy into the Jewish story and its dissemination.