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133 Paris, June 1945– May 1946 10 Eliezer arrived in Paris at the beginning of June 1945 as an emissary of the Polish Communist Party, tasked with promoting the party’s vision of a new Poland. He was just one of the displaced persons who streamed into the country after the war—les déportés, as the French called them in admiration , compassion, and fear. Tens of thousands of déportés found their way into France in the period between the end of 1944 and the end of the war, people seeking to return to what they saw as their homes in France. Some of them were resistance fighters that the Gestapo and its accessories in the Vichy regime had arrested and sent to concentration camps. Others had been deported by the Vichy government in 1943 to be slave laborers, and still others had been prisoners of war who had been captured in the French defeat in 1940 and who had been held in any of a variety of locations at the whim of the Third Reich. Still others were Jews or members of other minority groups who had been sent for extermination but who had managed somehow to survive . Like other countries, France had difficulty absorbing wave after wave of returnees. It had the best of intentions, but the aid agencies set up by the Allied command could not keep pace with ever-increasing needs. At the end of World War I, France had desperately needed working hands to rehabilitate its economy. But this time around most of the returnees constituted a heavy economic and social burden. The presence of these gaunt and traumatized refugees challenged the French to live up to the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity that were so central to their pride and national identity. Returning citizens were one thing, but by the summer of 1945 there were more than one hundred thousand déportés of forty-seven nationalities on French soil. Only a handful of those who had been deported during the war because of their religion or foreign nationality returned. More than 77,000 of the 350,000 Jews living in France on the eve of the war had been murdered.1 Furthermore, there were internal refugees, people who had been Friling - Jewish Kapo.indb 133 4/11/2014 2:49:01 PM 134 ||| A Jewish Kapo in Auschwitz forced by the war to leave their homes in one part of the country and flee to another.2 Coping with the refugees required French society to take up the complex challenge of addressing its recent past and of probing still-open wounds. What was to be done with the Vichy regime’s officials and supporters? What about those who had served in the “French Gestapo”? What about informers, collaborators, and other traitors to the Free French cause? Many were charged with treason and brought to trial, most famously Vichy leaders such as Marshal Pétain and Pierre Laval. Their photographs were pasted up on walls and appeared daily on the front pages of the newspapers , and their names were heard endlessly on the radio. The same desire to take revenge against traitors led to accusations against Eliezer and others who had served as concentration camp officials. The air in Paris was dense with charges of betrayal.3 Most treason charges were based on article 75 of the French criminal code, which was devoted to “collaboration with the enemy.” Some critics warned that the proceedings were summary and that in many cases former resistance fighters and relatives of déportés served as jurors. Some maintained that the special courts of justice that had been set up to handle these cases were acting just like the Vichy government’s special courts. Under the circumstances, as one of de Gaulle’s associates wrote, “it was not possible to do justice in peace and quiet.” But the provisional government had to take action, because otherwise citizens would take the law into their own hands and set up revolutionary courts—as had had already occurred when rioters broke into prisons in Dinan and Cusset and carried out lynchings against alleged collaborators. The authorities would quickly lose control.4 Pétain’s trial opened on July 23, 1945. Following the presiding judge’s opening words, Pétain read out a statement in which he claimed that all he had done had been in France’s interests. He was not guilty, he said, and the court...

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