Volume 26, Number 16 · October 25, 1979
Between Paris and Jerusalem
By Leon Wieseltier
When Memory Comes
by Saul Friedländer, translated by Helen R. Lane
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 186 pp., $9.95
On June 11, 1942, Heinrich Himmler demanded 100,000 Jews of France, for Auschwitz. Pierre Laval agreed in July to turn over 10,000. This would 'cleanse France of its foreign Jewry': the deportations, Laval insisted, would take only Jews from Germany and Central Europe who had sought refuge in the Unoccupied Zone. The roundups began at once. Switzerland sealed its frontiers. 'We cannot turn our country into a sponge for Europe,' the Swiss Minister of Justice announced. Jews who stole across were promptly returned to their fate. Among these were Jan and Elli Friedländer of Prague. They later perished, as planned, at Auschwitz. In Britain Herbert Morrison, the Home Secretary, entertained a proposal to admit at least the children of Vichy's doomed Jews. The Foreign Office, however, balked. Sir Alexander Cadogan, Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, observed that 'it seems to me wrong to support bringing children to this country at present.' Among these children was Jan and Elli's ten-year-old son, Pavel.[*]
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