Language:
English
Year of publication:
2003
Titel der Quelle:
History and Memory; Studies in Representation of the Past
Angaben zur Quelle:
15,2 (2003) 36-63
Keywords:
Tillion, Germaine
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Influence
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Personal narratives, French
;
World War, 1939-1945 Underground movements
Abstract:
One of the elements of what Henry Rousso termed the "Vichy syndrome" of France is the contention that the wartime resisters' memories of their experiences were corrupted by fabulists. The French postwar politics of memory equated deportations on political grounds (i.e. of resisters) with those on racial grounds (i.e. of Jews), which implied that both kinds of deportations were aimed at the use of deportees' labor and then at their extermination. One of the first to challenge this myth in the early 1970s was the historian Olga Wormser-Migot. Her research made her cast doubt on the existence of gas chambers in the Western camps, which was taken up by Holocaust deniers. The historian Germaine Tillion, herself a former resister and deportee to Ravensbrück, was asked by the National Association of the Former Deported Resisters (ADIR) to respond to Wormser-Migot. Opposing the denial of "France as a nation of resistance", Tillion took a moderate position, writing on the parallelism between "rapid extermination" in camps like Auschwitz, intended for mass killing of Jews, and "slow extermination" in camps for resisters.
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