Hypocrisie parisienne

La vie bien confortable des parisiennes durant l'Occupation.

Dans un accès de courage, la mairie de Paris va supprimer la campagne d'affichage annonçant l'exposition "Les Parisiens sous l'occupation", présentée jusqu'au 1er juillet à la Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris (BHVP).

Interrogé par l'AFP, Christophe Girard, adjoint PS au maire de Paris, chargé de la culture, explique la décision de la mairie par les "émotions" qui ont pu être ressenties et la "polémique" déclenchée par la manifestation. "Le titre ne nous plaît pas", a ajouté l'adjoint de Bertrand Delanoë.

L'exposition de la BHVP met en scène 250 photographies inédites en couleurs d'André Zucca, un photographe qui travaillait à l'époque pour Signal, un journal de propagande nazie.

Elle est présentée comme "une vision de la vie parisienne pendant l'Occupation et la Libération".

Une ville aux multiples cinémas et salles de spectacles.

Certaines photos montrent des beautés parisiennes et des Parisiens déambulant paisiblement sur les Champs-Elysées ou aux courses à Longchamp. Très peu ou pas de place est accordée à la réalité de l'occupation et de ses aspects dramatiques, comme les files d'attente devant les magasins d'alimentation ou les rafles de Juifs.

Il a été reproché à la BHVP de ne pas remettre ces images dans leur
contexte.

A la Libération, André Zucca a perdu sa carte de presse et été écarté de la
profession de journaliste.

Cette exposition est pourtant la bienvenue pour rappeler à la population parisienne que la Seconde Guerre mondiale ne se limite pas aux journées de la Libération quand toute une ville s'est racheté une bonne conduite.

Le parisien sait pêcher en eaux troubles.

Les photos d'André Zucca sont des mises en scènes assez convenues mais elles reflètent bien la connivence entre la population parisienne et l'armée allemande jusqu'au dernier jour. Un témoin, de passage à Paris en juillet 1944, m'a raconté avoir assisté à la scène suivante devant la gare Montparnasse. A l'heure de la sortie des bureaux, la place étant noire de monde, on entend le bruit de moteurs d'avions arrivant à basse altitude. Craignant les mitraillages, les passants s'égaillent dans tous les sens à la recherche d'un abri. Quand, soudain, un jeune ouvrier à la voix gouailleuse de titi parisien s'écrire : « Ce sont les nôtres ! » et la foule d'exclamer sa joie en voyant passer au-dessus de leurs têtes une formation de Messerschmitt M109 aux sinistres croix noires !

Mais il y a plus fort. Les éditions Heimdal ont publié voici quelques années un fort album consacré à une des divisions Waffen SS fétiches du IIIe Reich. Sur la route du front de Normandie, des régiments blindés de cette unité passent par Paris et les photographies prises par les correspondants de guerre de la division montrent dans toute leur banalité les rapports décontractés entre les Parisiens et les Waffen-SS. Les clichés où de jolies parisiennes flirtent avec les jeunes conducteurs de chars sont particulièrement évocateurs.

Les jolies parisiennes avaient un faible pour les conducteurs de chars de la Waffen-SS. Les mêmes vont s'accrocher au cou des soldats américains.

Certes ce témoignage, tout comme les photos d'André Zucca ou des PK de la Waffen-SS, ne révèlent qu'une face de Paris. Les persécutions, l'activité de la police, les pénuries n'y apparaissent pas. Mais cette face sombre de la vie de la capitale en guerre était occultée depuis près de soixante ans au profit d'une capitale résistante qui est un des mythes fondateurs de la France d'après-guerre.

Il était temps que Paris redescende sur terre pour commencer son autocritique. Si Bertrand Delanoë et Christophe Girard s'obstinent à refuser la réalité, on n'est pas près d'ouvrir le volume tant attendu des repentances parisiennes.

Paris en pleine résistance à l'Occupant.

Le correspondant à Paris du Times de Londres ne s'en laisse pas conter :

An unusual warning has been added to a Paris exhibition that has shocked some visitors and media, despite the absence of sex, violence or religion.

The photographic show has caused offence by depicting the French capital in the Second World War as a sunny place, where people enjoyed life alongside their Nazi occupiers.

Bertrand Delanoë, the Mayor, ordered a notice, in French and English, to be handed out at the door of the municipal exhibition of colour photographs that have stirred ghosts that Paris preferred to forget. The 270 never-published pictures avoid the “reality of occupation and its tragic aspects”, says the warning.

In the French collective memory, early 1940s Paris was a black-and-white hell of hunger, Nazi round-ups, humiliation and resistance. Films and books have in recent decades modified the cliché. The breathtaking colour series by André Zucca, a French photographer, show as never before a gay Paris that got on with life without great hardship.

Well-dressed citizens shop on the boulevards and stroll in the parks; young people crowd nightclubs; bikini-clad women bathe in the fashionable Deligny pool. The terraces of familiar cafés are crowded and commuters with briefcases march into the Métro.

The differences are the absent traffic, the Wehrmacht uniforms and red swastikas hanging from the grandest facades. In one sinister picture – taken in the street beside the gallery – an old woman wears a yellow Star of David, the insignia that Jews were forced to display. According to critics, the organisers at the Paris Historical Library neglected to make it clear that Zucca, a respected prewar photographer, was working for the German propaganda machine.

Pierre Assouline, a writer, said in Le Monde: “In the shadows of these same streets, they were dying of hunger and cold. Raids and torture were taking place. Here we see only relaxation, joie de vivre, the nonchalance of a kind of happiness.” Christophe Girard, the deputy mayor in charge of culture, said that he found the exhibition “embarrassing, ambiguous and poorly explained”.

Jean Derens, the director of the library, rejected the criticism, saying that everyone knew the photographer was a collaborator: “If there is a visitor who is unaware of the nature of the occupation, it’s sad, but that does not mean that everything has to be reexplained every time.” He said that the critics were not content with his leaflet, which states: “Zucca portrays a casual, even carefree Paris. He has opted for a vision that does not show . . . the queues . . . the rounding-up of Jews, posters announcing executions.” The library praises the skill of Zucca, “who played on colours like an aesthete” and chronicled the occupation privately, using rare Agfacolor film supplied by the Wehrmacht. The sunny aspect of the photos stemmed from the need to shoot the early colour film in bright light, it adds.

The exhibition reminds viewers that Paris was relatively comfortable under the Nazis because Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, decreed that the capital should be “animated and gay” to show off the “new Europe”. Theatres and cinemas were kept busy; Edith Piaf sang, and Herbert von Karajan conducted.

The collection, restored to the original colour with digital techniques, was bought by the city from Zucca’s family in 1985. The photographer was arrested after the 1944 liberation but never prosecuted. He worked until his death in 1976 under an assumed name as a wedding photographer west of Paris.

— The exhibition is open every day except Mondays, 11am to 7pm, at the Bibliotheque Historique de la Ville de Paris.

Le bon choix de Louis Brandeis

Louis Brandeis, l'homme par lequel la liberté s'est imposée.

Le 23 février dernier, le journaliste Jonathan Kay a publié un fort intéressant article dans les colonnes du National Post sur les origines de la liberté d'expression telle qu'elle est pratiquée aujourd'hui aux Etats-Unis et il la compare aux restrictions de cette même liberté d'expression dans les autres pays développés et notamment au Canada. Il montre comment la communauté juive a pu prendre deux décisions radicalement opposées en deux pays différents et à près de soixante ans d'écart.

Dans le premier cas, Louis Brandeis, le premier juge juif nommé à la Cour suprême des Etats-Unis, a fait pencher la balance en faveur d'un torchon antisémite au nom de la liberté d'expression; dans le second cas, les organisations juives canadiennes ont été les instigatrices d'un mécanisme de restriction de la liberté d'expression destiné à museler les révisionnistes sur le modèle des législations européennes. Or, les plus ardents défenseurs de la censure découvrent maintenant qu'elle protège les plus virulents adversaires du judaïsme : l'islamisme militant.

A tout prendre, le modèle de liberté d'expression défendu par Louis Brandeis est le seul qui puisse convenir à une société développée.

Jonathan Kay on free speech, 'yeggs,' and the fight for the political soul of Canadian Jewery

Some 80 years ago, "Big Mose" Barnett, a notorious Minneapolis gangland chief, sent his crew to shake down a dry cleaner by the name of Samuel Shapiro. When Shapiro refused to pay, Barnett's thugs sprayed down his customers' clothes with acid.

Modern stereotypes notwithstanding, Jewish gangs were no joke in the 1920s. And they weren't above rubbing out nosey journalists. None of the local newspapers would touch the Shapiro story -- except one: a weekly rag called the Saturday Press, published by a certain Jay M. Near. That lone tabloid made a difference. When Near wrote a scathing article about Shapiro's plight, embarrassed prosecutors moved against Barnett's men.

Unfortunately, apart from being a fearless scourge of the underworld, Near was also quite the politically incorrect hothead. One of his Saturday Press articles, for instance, declared that "practically every vendor of vile hooch, every owner of a moonshine still, every snake-faced gangster and exbryonic yegg in the Twin Cities is a Jew." (Don't ask me what a yegg is, let alone an "exbryonic" one. I have no idea.)

In 1927, the courts shut the Saturday Press down under Minnesota's Public Nuisance Law, which banned any newspaper that was "malicious, scandalous and defamatory." Near appealed the judgment, and took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. His victory created a landmark in First Amendment jurisprudence, and paved the way for the ultra-free press Americans now enjoy.

Did Near win because the high court was packed with anti-Semites? Just the opposite. As former New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis notes in a new book, Freedom for the Thought We Hate, a crucial swing vote in the Court's 5-4 majority was that of Louis Brandeis. As someone old enough to remember Ulysses Grant's mass-expulsion of the Jews from conquered Union territories during the Civil War, Brandeis had more than a passing knowledge of anti-Semitism. Yet he was also a principled legal scholar who understood the value of a free press. It speaks volumes about America's constitutional tradition that a man such as Jay M. Near would be un-muzzled by the first Jew who ever sat on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Here in Canada, things have followed a different route. Crucially, the most important hate-speech precedents in this country arose after the Holocaust, at a time when suppressing hatred was taken to be a more important goal than protecting freedom.

The creation of human-rights tribunals and Canada's hate-speech law -- Section 319 of the criminal code -- were both cheered by the Jewish legal and activist establishment. In the seminal 1990 case of R. v. Keegstra, which upheld the validity of Section 319, the intervenors included not only Canadian Jewish Congress and B'nai Brith, but also InterAmicus, a think tank then headed by renowned international-law expert (and future federal justice minister) Irwin Cotler. (Read the Supreme Court's Keegstra judgment and you will find chunks lifted straight from the InterAmicus brief.)

Over time, the prosecution of anti-Semites such as Ernst Zundel, James Keegstra, Malcolm Ross and Doug Collins created a legal template for Canada's hate-speech jurisprudence. It created a moral template as well: Censorship advocates justified their speech codes by appealing to the horrors of the Holocaust. To oppose hate-speech laws, many human-rights types argue to this day, is to give comfort to fans of Mein Kampf.

It goes without saying that the battle against anti-Semitism is an important one. And those who've made it their life's calling deserve our respect. That said, it is clear that Canadian Jews put their chips down on the wrong side of the hate-speech issue. On a purely gut level, it may seem comforting to have laws on the books that gag society's bigots. But, as is always the case with ideologically motivated censorship, the long-run cost exceeds the benefit.

That cost includes the crippling of debate that inevitably arises when you declare any point of view -- no matter how odious -- be off limits. As the recent human-rights cases against MacLean's and the Western Standard show, there will always be complainants and commissars willing to expand the definition of prohibited speech to encompass legitimate discourse. Ironically, the censorship regime that well-meaning Jewish intellectuals helped put in place to fight anti-Semitism a generation ago is now being applied to prosecute the pundits blowing the whistle on the one truly genuine threat that Jews are facing worldwide: militant Islam. Thin-skinned types may find Levant and Mark Steyn over the top. But then, lots of people said the same thing about Near. Whether the threat is shariah or shakedowns, the marketplace of ideas needs its fearless mavericks. Just ask Samuel Shapiro. Better yet, ask Irshad Manji, Salim Mansur, Ujjal Dosanjh, Tarek Fatah, or any of the other identity-politics dissidents who've been labeled "malicious, scandalous and defamatory" by members of their own communities.

As far as Canadian Jews are concerned, there is another less obvious cost to putting the community's moral authority behind institutionalized censorship: It cements a collective self-identity based around victimhood. The message is: "We are so vulnerable, so incapable of arguing down the brain-dead lunatics who attack us with words, that we need state censors to act as our shield."

Though criminal prosecutions against anti-Semites are actually quite rare, the few that arise encourage the conceit of a community besieged by murderous hatred. This conceit, though useful in creating a shared sense of community solidarity, has served to distract Canadian Jews from the happy fact that anti-Semitism is completely extinct in our society's respectable mainstream. Canada is probably as close to a post-anti-Semitic society as has ever existed in any nation in Western history --including modern-day Israel. But you wouldn't know it from the lachrymose doom-speak emanating from the acronymed Jewish activist establishment.

That is one of the many reasons why the stakes are so high in the fight to reform human-rights law in this country. The ongoing sniping match between Levant and the Jewish establishment is essentially a proxy battle in a larger struggle for the political soul of the Jewish community. It is a fight between those Jews who support free speech, and those who support censorship; between those focused on the new threat of militant Islam, and those still worried about neo-Nazi kooks; between those who want Jews to take a vocal leadership role in the defining ideological battle of our time, and those who see themselves as passive victims who require protection from a nanny state.

I know what side I'm on. But yeggs like me and Ezra can take this battle only so far. What we really need to lead this movement is a Canadian Brandeis. Mr. Cotler, what do you say?

kay@nationalpost.com

Antisémitisme polonais

Professeur de philosophie à l'université de Varsovie, Jakub Kloc-Konkolowicz a publié le 18 janvier dernier dans les colonnes du Frankfurter Rundschau un article consacré à l'antisémitisme polonais à l'occasion de la parution en Pologne de l'ouvrage de Jan Tomasz Gross Fear, Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (New York 2006).

Jan Tomasz Gross has taken on the difficult task of removing blind spots in Polish history. His new book Fear has sparked an emotional debate in the country of his birth, where anti-Semitism is not a popular subject.
In recent days a new chapter in the emotional debate over Polish anti-Semitism has opened in Poland. The occasion is the Polish edition of a new book by the Princeton historian of Polish origin Jan Tomasz Gross. The book with the punchy title Fear. Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (New York 2006) revolves around a central question: "How was Polish anti-Semitism possible after Auschwitz?" According to the reports by Holocaust survivors cited by the author, rather than being welcomed with open arms, Polish Holocaust survivors were met in their hometowns by the cynical question "Are you still alive?!"

The Holocaust victims were confronted with more or less open hostility on the part of the Polish population, which ultimately ended in pogroms. Gross' book examines three of these in detail, in Rzeszow (1945), Krakow (1945) and the most notorious pogrom in Kielce (1946) in which 37 Jews were murdered.

For Gross, neither the allegedly widespread participation of Polish Jews in the slowly consolidating Communist regime nor the horror stories circulating about the ritual murder of Christian children were the real reasons for these occurrences. Ultimately, economic interests were behind the events. Many Poles had taken possession of Jewish property after the German occupiers fled, and the Holocaust survivors' return was perceived as a real threat. Regardless of the pretexts for the pogroms, Gross writes, their real purpose was to get rid of the inconvenient victims.

Although many Poles had heroically come to the aid of their fellow Jewish citizens by providing them with shelter at their own peril, most had looked on with indifference – sometimes even approval – at the crimes committed by the German occupiers on the Jews. Pangs of conscience can be very effective, destructive even, especially when they veil a clear interest.

Gross is particularly critical of the Polish Catholic Church, maintaining that with the exception of the Bishop of Czestochowa, clerics not only did nothing to protect Jewish survivors from assaults after the war, but even sought explicitly to justify these attacks to a greater or lesser extent. Nevertheless, one must add, Gross' controversial book was printed in Poland by a respectable Catholic publisher.

This is not the first time that a book by Gross has created a stir in Poland. The publication in 2001 of his "Neighbors" had already kindled an emotional debate about the Polish population's involvement in the Holocaust. That book dealt with the murder of the Jewish residents of Jedwabne (a small town in Eastern Poland) in 1941. For decades under the Communist regime this crime was attributed to the German troops. It was only with Gross' assertion that Polish neighbours had carried out the crime that an investigation initiated by the Polish Institute for National Remembrance (IPN) confirmed direct Polish participation (leaving the role of the German occupiers open).

Even before the report was published, Alexander Kwasniewski, then Polish president, officially apologised for the Jedwabne murders "in the name of those Poles whose consciences are troubled by this crime."

Many people never forgave Kwasniewski for this apology. Most Yad Vashem trees (dedicated to the "Righteous Among the Nations" who risked their lives to save threatened Jews during WWII) bear Polish names. Poland was the sole occupied country where helping Jewish citizens was punishable by death. Under the occupation, the Polish underground Armia Krajowa initiated a structure unique in Europe (called Zegota) which offered aid – including military support – to the Jews.

Since the Poles staunchly resisted the Nazi aggression and were themselves victims of Hitler's policy of genocide, many saw – and continue to see – themselves exclusively in the role of war victims. For that reason they consider any allegation that casts Poles in the role of perpetrators a brazen effrontery, if not a direct attack on the Polish people. Accordingly, even events that took place after World War II, in particular the pogrom in Kielce, are seen by many historians as a provocation by the (Polish or even Soviet) secret service, which sought to damage Poland's image in Western Europe and secure its adhesion to the Russian sphere of influence.

It's no wonder, then, that Jan Tomasz Gross is such a controversial figure in Polish public life, although he has never questioned the merits of the Poles, nor their bravery in the fight against fascism. Hence it was predictable that his new book would set off a new wave of outrage even before it came out in Polish. Already after the original version was published in the US, some Polish senators alerted the Polish public prosecutor's office that the book could insult the Polish people and incite hatred, charges which the office is currently reviewing.

The radical Catholic League of Polish Families has officially demanded that the Polish Foreign Ministry deny Gross entry into Poland. Many commentators believe Gross' book reveals no previously unknown facts, brings nothing new into the debate and is more an essay "with a presupposed thesis" than a genuine historical study. Janusz Kurtyka, director of the Institute of National Remembrance, has accused Gross of historical incompetence and highly one-sided use of his sources.

But critical voices are also being heard among moderates, for example Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, the secretary to Pope John Paul II, as well as the legendary Solidarnosc leader Lech Walesa, who maintained Gross' book would awaken dangerous demons and divide where it should reconcile. The Polish–Jewish dialogue must be carried out with a view to the future, not the past, Walesa argued. Very few people have come to the defence of this author, who has taken on the difficult task of making uncomfortable facts known to a wider audience and removing blind spots in Polish history. His supporters include Konstanty Gebert, chief editor of Midrasz a Jewish-interest magazine.

However the widespread Polish indignation is also explained by the fact that many feel the book paints an outdated portrait of Poland. Many believe the old mantra of Polish anti-Semitism is no longer rings true, because much has changed since the 1990s. The policy of reconciliation and dialogue between Poles and Jews begun by President Walesa and carried through by his successor Kwasniewski – as well as current President Lech Kaczynski – has been highly successful. Jewish life in Poland has reawakened, and interest in Jewish culture, history and religion has grown enormously, especially among young Poles. Many Jewish festivals have been established and exhibitions and theatre performances focussing on Jewish issues are on the rise. Just a few weeks ago, the postal workers' union spontaneously and successfully refused to distribute anti-Semitic brochures put out by an extreme right-wing politician.

Jan Tomasz Gross by no means denies these tremendous changes in Polish society. He simply believes that uncomfortable topics of the past must be discussed openly. Controversy over a book is always welcomed by it's author, people say. The only thing Gross would find scandalous would be if this debate had to be continued in the courtroom.

You only need to look at the development of the democratic public sphere in Poland since the 1990s, however, to see that this debate, emotional as it is, is far more likely to be carried out in a more appropriate forum. And in all probability it will lead Poles to regard their history with more critical distance. Regardless of people's fears, it is unlikely that the book and the discussion around it could harm Jewish–Polish dialogue.