DRANCY, France — This was once an antechamber to Auschwitz, the beginning of many ends.
In the 1940s it was here, on the outskirts of Paris, that about 65,000 Jews were interned and deported to their deaths in the horror universally known as the Holocaust but known in France as the Shoah. For the vast majority of them, the modernist apartment complex that housed this camp was the last image of France they saw before being forced onto trains to the gas chambers.
Today there is a memorial museum in Drancy, but the housing project — once known as the “Silent City”– is still in service, an eerie home for low-income immigrants who may or may not be aware of the things their walls have seen. On some level this is fitting. In the France — and the Europe — of the 21st century, the lessons of the 20th no longer seem self-evident, and certainly not sacrosanct.
For decades, France’s willing collaboration in the Nazi Holocaust was recognized as the most shameful chapter in the nation’s history, a story recounted in public schools and a crime for which a sitting French president formally apologized. Paris is home to one of the world’s premier Holocaust research centers, and black plaques adorn the facades of nearly every school from which a Jewish child was known to have been deported.
But despite these displays of public memory, the unthinkable has happened. The National Front — a political party founded by a convicted Holocaust denier — has mounted a surprisingly credible bid for the French presidency.
‘Detail of history’
The party’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, 88, once dismissed concentration camps such as Drancy as a “detail of history,” a remark that landed him in the political wilderness for decades. Now a very real scenario exists in which his daughter, Marine Le Pen, could win the upcoming French elections.
Serge Klarsfeld, 81, Klarsfeld, a child survivor of the Holocaust, has spent his entire working life tracking down former Nazis with his wife, Beate. Those the Klarsfelds have brought to justice include Klaus Barbie, the infamous “butcher of Lyon,” and Maurice Papon, a former civil servant who authorized the transfer of nearly 1,700 Jews from Bordeaux to Drancy. The Klarsfelds also are largely credited with having successfully pressured subsequent administrations of the French government to acknowledge publicly the country’s complicity in the Holocaust.
In short, they deal in the “details” that the elder Le Pen would rather forget.
And yet.
Sitting in his office, a veritable memory cavern strewn with books in a multitude of languages, stray photocopies of archival sources and oversize maps of various concentration camps, Klarsfeld struggled to put the rise of the National Front into words. Eventually, he sighed.
“I regret finishing my life in a period that so resembles the 1930s,” he said.
Marine Le Pen has nominally banished her father and made considerable efforts to curry favor with French Jews in the wake of recent terrorist attacks perpetrated by Islamist extremists. The National Front of today, her marketing machine would suggest, is not the National Front of the past.
But links between the two still exist. Despite the oft-invoked talking point that father and daughter are estranged, Jean-Marie Le Pen ultimately loaned his daughter’s campaign 6 million euros this month when a Russian bank could no longer meet its pledged amount.
Representatives of the National Front did not return requests for comment.
