Holocaust Odysseys: The Jews of Saint-Martin-Vésubie and Their Flight through France and Italy (review)

Susan Zuccotti’s new book is a sort of collective memoir of nine Jewish refugee families who fled first to southern France in the aftermath of the Nazi invasion of the Low Countries and France in May and June of 1940, then to the Italian occupied zone in 1942–1943 to escape deportations, and finally to Italy after Marshal Pietro Badoglio’s armistice with the Allies on September 8, 1943. Zuccotti conceived the idea for this book in 2003, when she attended a reunion of Jews who had spent some time during the war in the French town of Saint-Martin-Vésubie, in the former Italian occupied zone. Although based primarily on the oral testimonies of these Jewish survivors, who were mostly teenagers at the time, this beautifully written book also draws on published memoirs and secondary sources, as well as the rich archival research conducted for Zuccotti’s previous books on the Holocaust in France and Italy, and the Vatican’s response to the Holocaust.

The first section of this book is devoted to the experiences of these refugees in southern France from the summer of 1940 through the early fall of 1942. The most interesting aspect of these accounts is that they show that the situation in southern France during this period was not altogether intolerable. Although some of these refugees spent time in French internment camps, where conditions were appalling, many managed to live outside the camps, either in assigned residences or serving in Groupements de Travailleurs Étrangers (GTE) units. As Zuccotti shows, due to the efforts of Jewish organizations as well as the interfaith Nîmes committee, children in particular were frequently allowed to leave the camps in order to be placed in children’s homes mostly run by Jewish organizations. Moreover, prior to the summer of 1942, camp conditions were actually improving. Zuccotti thus concludes that “life for Jewish refugees lucky enough to be outside the French internment camps during these early years of the Vichy regime was difficult but not unpleasant” (p. 49).

The real brutality began in the summer of 1942, when the Germans, with the assistance of Vichy police, began to round up foreign Jews, not only in Paris, but in the internment camps in the south, in order to ship them first to Drancy and ultimately to death camps in Poland. As the situation in the south deteriorated, the Italian occupied zone around Nice increasingly seemed the best option. Although the Italians were allied with the Germans, word quickly spread of their lenient treatment of Jewish refugees. Hence, many of these refugees, most of whom were youths now completely on their own, fled to Nice. There, they were directed by the Italian authorities and the Jewish refugee committee to smaller towns and villages in the area, including especially Saint-Martin-Vésubie, which eventually provided sanctuary to some 1,100–1,250 Jews.

For these refugee youths, who had been living in terror of being arrested by Vichy police, Saint-Martin-Vésubie, despite being an assigned residence, seemed idyllic. Even though these refugees remained subject to police controls, they were treated with extraordinary generosity both by the Italian authorities and by the local population. As one of Zuccotti’s witnesses told her, “It was a paradise for us. The Italians even put the carabinieri to guard the synagogue from the French police” (p. 87).

This situation came to an abrupt end in September 1943, when the newly installed Italian government of Marshal Badoglio signed an armistice with the Allies. Although Delasem, the Italian Jewish relief organization, had devised a plan to evacuate the Jews from these territories to North Africa, the armistice was announced prematurely, and these schemes fell by the wayside. Italian troops swiftly retreated across the Alps, and the Germans marched in, inaugurating a brutal anti-Jewish crackdown, which led to the arrest of...