One Step Ahead: A Jewish Fugitive in Hitler's Europe (review)

Holocaust survivor memoirs generally fall into one of four categories; survivors of the death camps, Jewish partisans who fought against the Germans, Jews who survived the war by posing as Gentiles, and those who were hidden by Gentiles. As refugees the author and his father escaped the Vichy government’s roundup of Jews on August 26, 1942 by obtaining false papers. Subsequently, they managed to make their way into the Italian occupation zone of France, and survive the war in Italy.

Alfred Feldman was born into a middle-class Polish Orthodox Jewish family in Hamburg Germany in 1923. In 1932 the family, which included two younger sisters, moved to Antwerp, Belgium, where they joined their father who had earlier been transferred by his metallurgy company. The author recalls the warmth of his family life which centered around religious observance as well as close parental ties. But he also recalls his early awareness of antisemitism and his stark memory of his uncle’s murder at the hands of Nazi thugs in Cologne in 1935. Following the German invasion of Belgium in 1940, the Feldmans were forced to flee Antwerp, thus joining the more than a million refugees who sought to escape the Nazis and find sanctuary in France.

Readers unfamiliar with the pro-Nazi and antisemitic policies of Vichy France will benefit from Susan Zuccotti’s introduction, which summarizes the antisemitic laws promulgated by the French government, and the privations endured by both foreign and native-born Jews in both Vichy and Nazi-occupied France. Feldman’s memoir recounts the human tragedy that accompanied this sordid history. The author recalls his father’s failed effort to obtain a visa that would allow the family to emigrate to the United States. He arrived at his appointment with the U.S. Consul in June 1941 only to be told of the Russell Act’s “close relatives” restriction. The Russell Act, which was passed by Congress in June 1941, barred immigration to the United States to all persons with close relatives in Nazi-occupied Europe. The visa request was turned down because his sister, Klara, resided in German-occupied Antwerp.

Unable to leave France, the family next confronted the travail of the “roundups.” In August 1941 the French police arrested Jews who were sent to the Drancy internment camp. Among those apprehended by the French police were Alfred’s mother and sisters, who were taken along with thousands of other Jews and sent to Drancy. Thanks to false papers, Alfred and his father were able to avoid arrest. After the war, Alfred would discover that his mother and sisters had been deported from Drancy to Auschwitz, and were gassed in September of that year. In regard to the unfolding “Final Solution,” Feldman reminds us that throughout his refuge in France, and later in Italy, he “remained utterly ignorant of the Holocaust.” In fact, he informs us, it was only after the war, when he had read books by survivors of the death camps that he understood what was being done there. In Paris, he writes, “I did not hear the term ‘death factory,’” nor did he encounter a single camp survivor.

Much of Feldman’s memoir focuses on how he and his father managed to stay one step ahead of the Nazis, first by obtaining false identity papers in France, and later escaping to the Italian zone of occupied France, where they found the Italian army willing to protect Jews. In September 1943, both the father and son joined a number of refugees and crossed the Alps into Italy to evade the Germans but, early in September, the Germans occupied the country following the Italian surrender to the Allies. Although given shelter by the archdiocese in Genoa, the sanctuary did not last inasmuch as the Italian priests involved in protecting refugees found their operation compromised. The Jewish refugees, including Alfred and his father, were forced to hide in the mountains surrounding the Italian province...