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  • Père Marie-Benoît and Jewish Rescue: How a French Priest Together with Jewish Friends Saved Thousands during the Holocaust by Susan Zuccotti
  • David J. Diephouse
Père Marie-Benoît and Jewish Rescue: How a French Priest Together with Jewish Friends Saved Thousands during the Holocaust, Susan Zuccotti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), xv + 276 pp., hardcover $35.00, electronic version available.

Susan Zuccotti’s latest book offers a compelling portrait, at once scholarly and warmly personal, of a remarkable man. The French Capuchin friar Père Marie-Benoît, in concert with equally remarkable Jewish rescuers and a constantly evolving network of Church and Resistance contacts, helped save as many as 4,000 lives during the course of World War II. Marie-Benoît worked out of monasteries first in Marseille and after September 1943 in Rome, where he had studied and served as a theology professor during the interwar decades. In telling his story, Zuccotti provides insights into the dynamics of Jewish rescue in Vichy France and Italy. She adds texture to the critical analysis of the Church response in her earlier work, notably her much-discussed Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy (2000).

Affectionately dubbed the “Father of the Jews” by his protégés, Père Marie-Benoît—who died in 1990 a few weeks short of his 95th birthday—garnered considerable recognition during his lifetime. He was made an officer of the French Legion of [End Page 335] Honor, declared a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, and singled out for praise by President Lyndon Johnson. His rescue efforts have been discussed in any number of other works, not least those of Zuccotti herself. But this is by far the most comprehensive and thoroughly documented account available, the fruit of decades of research in private and archival sources as well as numerous interviews with participants, including Père Marie-Benoît himself. As the subtitle indicates, Zuccotti emphasizes that Père Marie-Benoît did not act in isolation: rescue was invariably a collective enterprise.

One of Zuccotti’s theses is that the collaboration of both Jews and non-Jews was crucial to most efforts, bringing together financial resources, channels of information, and organizational structures that neither group could have commanded on its own. Zuccotti’s book therefore also pays extensive tribute to the vision and courage of Père Marie-Benoît’s principal Jewish partners, many of whom—perhaps most notably the Viennese lawyer Stefan Schwamm—remained lifelong friends. And it includes the personal experiences of numerous refugees, many of whom likewise became close friends. In this respect it complements and expands Zuccotti’s earlier case study of refugee experience in the same areas, Holocaust Odysseys: The Jews of Saint-Martin-Vésubie and Their Flight through France and Italy (2007).

Rescuers and protégés alike, it goes without saying, had to contend with constant danger and frequent heartache. Not everyone could be saved; rescuers also faced deportation to the camps or were forced into hiding, including toward the end Père Marie-Benoît himself. Like many rescuers, Padre Benedetto (as he was known in Italy) regarded what he did as unexceptional, a natural response to human needs that presented themselves and could not be ignored. He offered few retrospective comments about specific factors that motivated his actions. Yet it was hardly selfevident that a pious miller’s son from a rural village in western France, drawn to a religious vocation at an early age, a theologian-intellectual who had no known prior contact with Jews or Judaism beyond university courses in Hebrew, should have become so resolute in his opposition to antisemitism or so deeply invested in the cause of rescue and reconciliation. Zuccotti explores a number of likely motivations, both personal (a strong capacity for friendship, an evident taste for adventure) and sociological. Père Marie-Benoît came from a region subject to anticlerical violence during the French Revolution and under the Third Republic, where collective memory and personal experience may have predisposed him, like the Huguenots of Le Chambon with whom he would later collaborate, to...

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