The Voice of Silence: Alain Resnais' Night and Fog and collective memory in post-Holocaust France, 1944-1974

Rice I The Voice of Silence: Alain Resnais' !Sight and Fog ana collective memory in post-Holocaust France, 1944-1974 The Voice of Silence: Alain Resnais' Night and Fog and collective memory in post-Holocaust France, 1944-1974 Louisa Rice Rutgers University The 1955 release of Alain Resnais' documentary on the concentration camps, Night and Fog, marked a change in French collective memory of World War Two by introducing images of the Holocaust into the public arena for the first time since the war.1 This visual remembrance appeared to fill a void in the French post-war discussion ofthe 1940-45 experience, a discussion which had, up until this time, largely ignored the destruction of the lews. The film seemed to expose the experience of a group of war victims who had previously been ignored. However , the manner in which the documentary depicted the Holocaust revealed that alongside the "official" silence about French complicity in the Final Solution, a different kind of silence would persist within French war memory—one which, paradoxically, said a great deal about the French political atmosphere during the 1950s and its connections to the second World War, but little about the destruction of the Jews. This essay will explore the political and cultural environment that contributed to Resnais' failure to vocally identify French complicity in the Holocaust and his omission of an explicit naming of the Jews in his film. Before analyzing the documentary and the atmosphere that shaped it, it is first necessary to summarize the actions of the Vichy government ( 1940- 1944) and examine the nature of the war memory that prevailed in France following the collapse of the regime. It will be shown that the memory of Vichy in 1950s France greatly impacted Resnais' depiction of the Holocaust, even as he attempted to overcome the constraints that this memory presented. The Vichy Legacy TheVichy government was established in the non-occupied French zone in 1940 after the capitulation of Paris and the French surrender to the Germans. Vichy undertook a series of measures that at first targeted non-native Jews (those who were living in France but were not naturalized French citizens), and were eventually also aimed at French Jews. The initial steps taken were legal ones: the Vichy government repealed the loi Marchendeau (the law that had prohibited press attacks on racial and religious groups) on August 27, 1940, and introduced the Statut des Juifs just over one month later. The statate defined Jews as those with only two grandparents "of the Jewish race," limited the number of Jews allowed to work in the certain professions, and threatened to intern all Jews caught breaking this new law.2 The official persecution of the Jews gathered pace with the introduction of internment camps in the unoccupied area of France. In 1940, Vichy officials began to intern foreign Jews, as well as lesser numbers of gypsies and veterans of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). By the middle of 1 941 , all Jews became subject to internment, whether they had broken the statute or not. Although estimates vary, it is generally agreed that at least 50,000 French and non-French Jews were interned in France between 1940 and 1942 (that is, before the deportations and Final Solution began3). The conditions in theseVichy-run camps were squalid, with cramped living spaces, little food and poor sanitation. As a consequence at least 3,000 Jews perished from disease.4 Finally, the Vichy government was to assist with the deportation of Jews from France to the death camps in Poland. French police were responsible for several round-ups of Jews in both the occupied and unoccupied zones, with the result that by the end of 1 942, 42,500 Jews had been deported from France to Auschwitz; by 1944 this figure reached 75,000. Only three percent of those deported survived.5 The French public would not learn of the extent of French involvement in the deportations until the 1970s. However, a French memory ofsome involvement, whether conscious or unconscious, was evident in the events and reaction to them examined here. In assessing the Jewish policy of the Vichy government...