In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

24 Saint-Cyprien, Paris, Les Tourelles, Beaune-la-Rolande, France, 1939–1942 5 After crossing into France, Eliezer and his stateless comrades were sent to the internment camp at Saint-Cyprien, pending determination of their cases. They realized that they had left France illegally, but as far as they were concerned they had done so to fight for the forces of good. That being the case, they maintained that, now that the war in Spain was over, they deserved, despite their lack of citizenship, to be allowed to reestablish their residence in France. Wasn’t it only natural for a European country with a long-standing revolutionary heritage to allow them to do so? But the French authorities and the gendarmerie thought differently.1 The unit that had been put together from the remains of the Botwin Company and other International Brigades soldiers had secured the northern retreat of Republican forces and their supporters, serving as a rearguard for some half a million refugees who fled into France. The French authorities established several hastily built internment camps to hold these expatriates—not just at Saint-Cyprien, but also at Gurs, Argèles, and Le Vernet. The latter held those brigade fighters and Spanish refugees that the French considered the most dangerous. Some brigade soldiers were sent to a camp in southern Algeria, including all the volunteers who had come from that country. In some of the camps conditions were harsh.2 While the camps were originally set up to take in refugees from Spain, they would, within less than a year, serve as concentration camps for the many Jews being arrested by the French.3 The Jewish-German artist Felix Nussbaum, flushed out by the Nazis from his hiding place in Belgium, was among those sent to the camp, where he painted a series of canvases documenting life there. Once again, Miriam Gruenbaum came to her son’s rescue. This time she had to travel a much greater distance—she left Jerusalem for Paris, as her youngest son, Yonatan, said, “to free the boy,” a boy who was now thirty-one. In Paris she knocked on government doors, and once again she was able to Friling - Jewish Kapo.indb 24 4/11/2014 2:48:56 PM France, 1939–1942 ||| 25 enlist the aid of influential friends and acquaintances. Marc Jarblum, the old family friend, was as always ready to help. In the end, Miriam’s campaign succeeded. Eliezer was permitted to return to Paris. In March 1939, exactly a year after leaving for Spain, he returned to rue Linné to finish up his political economy degree. He received his diploma two months later.4 He also resumed his Communist activities, returned to his newspaper job, and reunited with Bronke. But this normal life was interrupted by war just a few months later. Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, and two days after that Britain and France declared war on Germany. For some months little happened in what was then called the Phony War, but that was just a calm before the storm of a conflict of unprecedented proportions. But before all this happened, in August, Eliezer’s father asked him about his plans and tried to persuade him to join the rest of the family in Palestine. Like other Zionist leaders, Yitzhak Gruenbaum traveled to Geneva that month to attend a packed Zionist Congress over which the threat of war hovered. During the final week, delegates received urgent cables calling on them to return home. Many left before the congress adjourned, fearing that borders would be closed. The congress’s standing committee had decided a few days previously to cut the congress short by a week. But then Chaim Weizmann, president of the Zionist Organization, appeared before the standing committee on Thursday, August 24, and proposed that the congress be adjourned that very night and not the next day, and his proposal was accepted. Yitzhak, fearful and yet hopeful, had already invited his son to meet him in Geneva.5 Eliezer again chose to stay in Europe. He consciously and freely chose “red assimilation.” When he returned to Paris, Eliezer volunteered for the French army. At this time, a Communist’s enlistment in a Western army was equivalent to shattering an entire squadron of idols. The Soviet Union, his ideological motherland, had signed a treaty of nonaggression with Nazi Germany in which the two countries agreed to partition Poland once again. The ­ Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact enabled Germany to invade...

Share