On October the 21st, French students had the opportunity to meet Serge Jacubert, member of Convoy 77 Association and son of Régine Jacubert who was deported in the convoy.

 

 

 

Text written by Capucine :

We met Serge Jacubert, he is the son of Régine Jacubert, born Skorka, and so he is Yerme (Jérémie) Skorka’s nephew. He has presented us a powerpoint about the association Convoi 77, told us why/how it was created, how does it work etc, then he has made us a little quiz to put the light on some prejudices we could have. The first question was about the percentage of Jews in the German population in the 30’s, right after the election of A. Hitler in 1932. Almost all of us thought it was about 15%, but it was in fact less than 1% (the aim was to prove us that the German antisemitism wasn’t due to their number and the importance they may have had in the German population). The second question was what country counted the most “Justes parmi les nations”/” Righteous among the nations”, we equally assumed it was Netherlands, Poland, Germany, or France, but it was Poland first, then Netherlands and finally France.

Some information I remember more than the others: S. Jacubert told us that an average of 70 000 deported were from France (and not necessarily French people), and only 4 500 came back (about 5 or 6%). From the 77^th convoy, only 25% were back. The association also concentrates itself on this convoy (and not on all holocaust’s victims), in the aim to collect as much information as possible and to “give back to these people their humanity”.

 

Text written by Eléa :

 

 

First question (Imane) : Was it a taboo subject with your mother or did she tell you about it as a child?

Mr. Jacubert : Laughter. What a terrible question! I knew we were going to get there. When I was young, I went to summer camp in Celle-sur-Plaine (department of the Vosges, in the Grand-Est region). It was a colony where parents who didn’t have much money sent their children. We slept on benches literally; it was hay wrapped in a bag. And we fell asleep in the smoke because there was a stove smoking everywhere and we woke up frozen because the stove went out. And at night, on that bench, I would wake up, get up and stand up straight, and tell myself  ‘’What am I doing here? Maybe I’m in danger.” I felt like I was in danger. I didn’t know what, but I felt like I was in danger. It was the same as I had read in books with horrible photos and I had probably consulted this book without my parents' permission. It made me fear for my life. And so, it was a subject that was taboo because we had to turn to life, we had to relive life first. And that’s something we don’t talk about: those who died, died. In my home, there were no grandparents. Everyone who was going to die was dead. And it took me 22 or 23 years to go to a funeral. The defunt was my wife’s grandmother. But otherwise, I had never buried anyone. So we didn’t talk much about it and I had to wait in the 70s and 80s for my mother to start wanting to write a little bit of her memoirs, write what she had in her head. This gave birth to the book [Hunger for Life versus Death Factory (2009)], which recounts her childhood, the persecutions she may have suffered while she was in Poland. She went to Poland when she was 10 and she still remembers. When she left [Poland], she asked a Polish woman, “Where is the Jewish cemetery?” The Polish woman turned to her and said, “Go and don’t look back on your past.” So, talking about everything that happened to her in her youth, at the time of the persecutions, at the time of the war, it was really difficult. We had to look to the future and she wanted me to be like you, to study, to learn, to listen to my teachers so that I could progress and have a good degree and then a good job. Then, towards the end of her life, she started giving me some details. Once, when she was 90 years old, students insisted that she testify as she did in several schools. They asked really hard. I turned to her and I said, “Mom, do you want to?” She said, “No. I don’t want to go back there”. By “there”, she meant Birkenau. Because every time she intervened in front of students, she relived the scene again. I have great admiration for the deportees who continued to testify. Because they needed a strong driving force to keep talking about themselves in front of students.

 

Second question (Noa) : I read your mother’s biography [Régine Skorka-Jacubert] and I had a question about her fake ID. How did she get it?

Mr. Jacubert : Laughter. A relevant question. You should take a look at the film The Time of Disobedience (2006) in Nancy. The director [Patrick Volson] is a childhood friend of mine. Unfortunately, he passed away. He decided to bring to the screen the fight of the police officers responsible for watching the foreigners in Nancy, to file them and to kill them. This Foreign Office, like a block, when they heard about the Nancy round-up just after the Vél d'Hiv round-up, said, “They want all the Jews who live next door to the marketplace.” So they split up into groups and they skimmed the whole neighborhood around the market to warn people by saying, “We have to go. You have to run away.” For everyone, they had fake IDs. These IDs were made in the city of Metz (50km from Nancy). Why this city? Well, because the town hall burned in a bombing. As the town hall burned down, it was impossible to trace the identity papers and the corresponding registers. This allowed them to have solid identification, ‘’real’’ fake IDs. Edouard Vigneron, Pierre Marie and the other members of the Foreign Office of the Nancy Police Office were made «Righteous among the Nations» after the testimonies filed by my mother [Régine Skorka-Jacubert], my uncle [Jérôme Skorka] and other Jews of Nancy. They all testified that these men saved their lives. In the film, it’s very well done, we see that Edouard Vigneron was even imprisoned. Fortunately, he got away with it. So this is why my mother [Regina Skorka-Jacubert] had a “real” fake ID. There is a second story she told me as she began to open up to me and talk. I took her on a trip to Lyon to revisit the building in which they had taken refuge. In that building, there was a traboule. Does that word mean anything to you? The traboule is a passage of building that is typical of constructions in Lyon and that allows to get out of a building in two different places. It was very important to be able to escape in case there was a danger. When I took her to visit this building and tell stories to the young people who lived there, that’s when she told me. One day, in 1943, she was already aware that her parents had been deported without a trace. She was crying at a coffee shop when a Frenchman her age approached her and said, “You look sad, tell me what’s going on.” And this Frenchman listened to her and then announced that he was part of the Gaullist Resistance, that is to say the French Inner Resistance. But he was in the military. And they went out and did things that you do when you’re young. That’s when she lost her fake ID. The Frenchman took her with him, they went to a police office in Lyon, and with the prestige of his uniform and his presence, he said, ‘’I have all the informations : redo her an identity card. I testify and I certify.” My mother got her second ‘’real’’ fake ID. Here is the story of the identity card. She remained in this French Resistance until her friends told her, ‘’This is not your place Régine. In the French resistance, it is rather the people who are conservative and right-wing’’. All the friends they had were socialists or communists. They said, “You have to come to the Immigrant Labour Organization.” So she joined what was called the Jewish Resistance, which was a left-wing resistance at the time. Thus, it changed its resistance network at the end of 1943

Third question (Norbert) : Were there only women among the people who were deported to Kratzau?

Mr. Jacubert : To my knowledge, yes. There were only women. It was a women’s factory with SS women. All the supervision was female, there were only women. An anecdote about one of the SS woman: she had 5 brothers. My mother spoke German as she was from the Poznań region. And Poznań at the time was like in Poland today. Today, the city of Poznań is far from the German border. At the time, before the war, Poznań was bordering Danzig, what is now called Gdańsk had a German name, it was a German city. Therefore the border was very close so my mother spoke German by proximity. She could converse with the SS woman. And one day, during a more or less informal exchange, the SS woman told her, "When I think that my 5 brothers are dead and that we will still lose the war!". To what my mother thought, “Do you have to be inhumane to think that this person wants her brothers to have died for something?” As if losing five brothers, by the way, wasn’t losing the war, even if the war ended differently. For my mother, it was the pitch of madness : placing Germany’s victory above the lives of her five brothers. This SS woman will end up hanging during the liberation by the Red Army.

Fourth question (Chloe) : You mentioned a movie earlier. I would like to know what you think about films and representations on this subject.

Mr. Jacubert : I’m not a film critic. I’m not a film critic, but I’m starting to have seen a lot of them. And I measure how far we’ve come since Grief and Pity (1969). Does that mean anything to you Grief and Pity? It was with a song by Jean Ferrat if I remember correctly, Nuit et brouillard (1963). Grief and Pity is in the 1960s. It deals with the problems of the Jews at a time when we talked about them in a somewhat watered-down way, we didn’t look too closely at things, we didn’t look at things in the face. And then gradually, works of art became a little more relevant. We talk about the Shoah. We talk about it because of a work of art. This work of art is the documentary by Claude Lanzmann that bears this name, Shoah (1985). In Hebrew, it means ‘’disaster’’. It means a horrible event, something that happens and that we don’t give names to because we don’t have a word strong enough to express the horror it was. The Holocaust/Shoah is the vision of the mass murder of Jews during the Second World War by the Nazis, it is to talk about the facts but seen from the inside, seen from the Jewish people. The Anglo-Saxons use another term, “Holocaust”. What does Holocaust mean? From “holo” which means “whole” and from “caust” which means “burned”. Holocaust is the sacrifice in which the whole beast is burned in honor of the god. Among the Greeks, it was little used, the beast was usually partially burned to eat with the god. So there were two kinds of sacrifices. My uncle Jerome, in his book, says, ‘’What a horrible word to describe what happened to us, the mass murder of Jews during World War II ! Holocaust ! As if it were a sacrifice that pleases God.” So my uncle didn’t like the term ‘’Holocaust’’ very much. But when you go abroad, you have to get used to it. Do you know why this word was used by the Anglo-Saxons? Because there was a series. A series that described the miseries of the Jews during the Second World War. It was called Holocaust (1978). It’s as dumb as that. And so if you visit a memorial in the United States, it’s going to be the Holocaust Memorial. So art plays a very important role. The Holocaust show was a little more realistic but it had nothing to do with what Claude Lanzmann did, it did not show pictures. The idea of mass murder, gas chambers, freezing corpses, shovels pushing corpses. No, he didn’t show that. All he did was gather and accumulate testimonies of people : testimonies of executioners and testimonies of victims ; he gathered all that. This was the first and true great description of the Holocaust that allowed us to apprehend it correctly. Then came much stronger artistic works. One gave me goose bumps, which was absolutely incredible. It was done by a Hungarian who did a remarkable job in a country that can still remain fundamentally anti-Semitic, as I was able to visit, Hungary. And this movie is called The Son of Saul (2015). This is an absolutely incredible description of what happened that you can look at if you are not too sensitive. It shows and hears the noise and fury that could exist in the camps, to give some idea of what it is. 

 

Chloe : So it’s a good memory job?

Mr. Jacubert : Yes. It’s a very interesting piece of work that can bring a lot of ideas to people. When we measure the difference in approach, the depth of the historical work that is done, we see that they have touched on essential issues.

Fifth question (Marwa) : Were the people who denounced the Jews necessarily/all anti-Semitic or could it be under government pressure?

Mr. Jacubert  : Georges Mayer, the founder of the association, tells me that I am always too optimistic about humanity. He often says, “You always talk about those who saved the Jews, but you never talk about those who denounced them.” That’s true. I have a penchant for that. Unfortunately, there are not only good people on Earth ; there are also Jews who have been denounced by their caretaker. Why could the caretaker want to denounce Jews ? (Marwa responds to pressure from the government and Assia responds that pensions could be granted, so the incentive). Why can one want to denounce someone? (Noa answers that the person who denounces can simply share the opinion so by ideal and another student responds to be protected therefore avoid suspicion). In fact, the main reason people denounced the Jews was that they recovered their possessions afterwards. We took the jewellery, we took the furniture. Money was the essential engine. But, you are perfectly right, we must not forget those who did it by ideal. The people of the militia, they were engaged for the ideal: «Marshal, here we are!» it is revolutionary France. And it will murder Jewish bankers, draw money from the Jews, recover what is theirs because the Jews have been unfairly enriched in France (according to the militia). So you understand that there were many reasons why the Jews were denounced. I can tell you the story of a Nancy [resident], a great soldier, someone from high society whose son was in love with a woman named Annette Zelman. Her name had Jewish connotations. Well, what did this young man’s father do about their love ? He denounced Annette Zelman as a Jew! Annette was deported, didn’t come back. So what did the son do ? He joined the Resistance and managed to get himself killed. To make the father realize what he had done. So you see that there are many motives to denounce someone. It was enough for the Germans to know the terrain, to know what could motivate the population to denounce the Jews. In Poland, it was easy : a litre of vodka and about ten kilos of potatoes. That was what you got when you denounced a Jew. It wasn’t that expensive. That is why the Germans set up this system in Poland. In France, we had to implement slightly more sophisticated mechanisms. There was the reorganization of Jewish property and the one who had denounced a Jew was told, “You will get your share”. The Germans always found a method adapted to the terrain and the context in which they worked. It was a real job on their part. Don’t think this was a mission they took lightly. Alois Brunner, while the Allies are 100 km away, is very busy filling the train efficiently so that there are 1,300 people leaving for the factory to die. Because if the train isn’t filled, he hasn’t done his job. As he is a German, he has a scientific mind and well ordered, he cumulates cruelty with the organization. This is a characteristic that I have often found in Germany. Fortunately, their mentality has changed somewhat.

Sixth question (Noa) : How did your uncle Jerome escape from his camp ?

Mr. Jacubert : He didn’t escape. My uncle Jerome, at the end of October, when my mother was selected to go to the [German] ammunition factory (which, by the way, was part of all the factories dedicated to the last weapon of the Germans : the missiles V1 and V2. Inside, they made fuses of rocket and rocket that were to go to bomb London, breaking the morale of the English). They worked in these factories and my uncle was selected at that time to participate in the March of Death. He’s being sent to a camp called Struthof. And from this camp, they will walk on open-air plateaus in the middle of winter going to other camps. My uncle listed these camps in his book. The last camp was so dilapidated that at that time he failed the Germans and escaped into the fields with a friend. The Germans weren’t watching much anymore so it wasn’t a real escape, unlike a friend of my mother’s. Lillie Segal. She was a German. She escaped with a friend of hers. They managed to break with the German guards who were there and escape. Because they spoke the language of the country, they managed to return to Switzerland. Lillie Segal’s biography is on the site of Convoy 77.

Question Seven (Clara) : You say the association was created in 2014. But you, the memory fight, is that something you’ve been doing for long?

Mr. Jacubert : No, I don’t. I’m not very remembrance-oriented. Commemorations, plaques, regular meetings.... Serge Karsfeld and Beate, in their association, reunite children and families on the anniversary of the convoy’s departure. So on July 31, every year, Serge and Beate Karsfeld bring together all those who want to take part in the commemoration of the departure of the convoy. On that day, especially with the young people, we read the names of all the deportees who left in that convoy. It’s called “name reading”. Seeing this, Georges Mayer [the president of the association] said, ‘’When we meet like this, we are always between ourselves. On the other hand, surveys show that young people do not know much about the Holocaust. Something should be done to help with the transmission component, the teaching component, the pedagogy component. So that it’s more in people’s minds and they feel more involved in the research they’re doing on this.” That’s how the association was born. It was because the association had an educational training purpose that I decided to start. My brother was one of the founding members, and he was quite focused on the commemorative component. I myself hardly ever participated. It was with the training component and the international component that I realized that I was very interested. With the power dimension presented in other countries : I’m working with the Austrians now, we’ve already worked on it of course with the Poles. That’s what motivated my interest. More than the commemorative dimension.

Eighth question (Mathilde) : In the biographies we were able to read earlier, we can see that your mother was questioned by a man named Klaus Barbie. Can you tell us more about who he is and why he was judged in a trial ?

Mr. Jacubert : Klaus Barbie. Klaus Barbie was a senior German security officer in France. He was responsible for Lyon, its region and even a very large perimeter. He provided security and, as such, he fought the Resistance. When Klaus Barbie tries to do his eulogy, which is to praise him, he says, ‘’It was war. We were soldiers. And I was up against enemy soldiers”. That’s his way of putting it. The people who were tortured in the offices of Place Bellecour in Lyon by the Gestapo have a slightly different memory of Klaus Barbie. Especially Jean Moulin, the famous resistant who passed into his hands. The children of the house of Izieu, aged 5 to 15, also have a very different memory. He made the decision to have them deported. And none came back. So Klaus Barbie was that character. In June 1944, my mother and uncle were arrested on rue de l'Annonciade by the militia and a member of the Gestapo who had searched the house. They first managed to take my uncle and my mother got stuck too when she arrived. They were taken to the Gestapo premises. Here they were interrogated by Klaus Barbie who was the commander of the area ; he was fighting the inner enemies so he wanted them to confess that they were resistant. If they had a weapon or something that could have shown that they were resistant, they would have been shot on the spot. But since my uncle had been knocked unconscious during the arrest, they told him “You are Jewish”, so his sister was also Jewish. So they were either one or the other, resistant or Jewish. Because they could not be shown to be resistant, they were categorized as Jews. At the end of the questioning, Klaus Barbie said, “It’s okay, you’re going with the workers in Germany.” And so the deportation began. It was at the end of this interrogation that my mother and my uncle were called to testify at the trial of Klaus Barbie which took place in Lyon and which remains the first trial for which there was a registration authorization. A film was made and the debates were recorded. The purpose of this recording was not at leisure but it was a didactic purpose. So we can study it, work on it and teach it.

Ninth question (Imane) : Regarding the deportees on whom you have very little information, how do you manage to enrich their biographies?

Mr. Jacubert : We’re on our own. I’m just kidding. I was amazed at the result. If you look at Charlotte Schuhmann’s biography, I was blown away by what people could find. Young people have such imagination that they can come up with unthinkable things. You have ideas that wouldn’t even cross my mind. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Japanese exam joke. We bring him in, there’s a group of very educated, very intelligent people in front of him. There’s also a 100kg bar. The subject of the exam is to lift the bar. The competitors all try but none succeed because the bar is too heavy. When it is the turn of the Japanese, he runs away and comes back with 3-4 people who help him lift the bar . That’s how they pass the exam. That’s an example of how you can solve difficult challenges with totally unimaginable ideas. It may also be a team effort : asking for support from others, managing other sources. This will make it possible to launch.

Tenth Question (Marc) : Did your mother or uncle deal with Josef Mengele? He was the doctor at the Aushwitz-Birkenau camp and he carried out experiments on deported Jews, especially on twins. He’s one of the best-known Nazis.

Mr. Jacubert : At least once. At least once. And it’s a very interesting question because when my mother met a doctor she liked, she would say, “You’re doing a job that I’ve seen absolutely horrible people for.” It immediately gave the doctors confidence, they were comfortable, relaxed. Laugher. This little 6'5 old woman turns to him and says, ‘’Oh you know, I’ve seen doctors and they weren’t great. I wouldn’t say they were doing tests ; I would call them experiments.” What’s the difference between a test and an experiment? A test is done to identify a problem, it’s done to identify something. An experiment… it’s an experiment. Laughter. It’s matter, it’s objects. You’re right to quote Josef Mengele. They were outstanding scientists. Never forget that when we broke IG Farben in 3 (it was the German chemical industry), each company from IG Farben was the world leader in its field. After the war, after World War II. So that gives you an idea of the powerful scientist and intellectual of the Germans. In the medical field, they were way ahead as well. They were thinking, “We want to send people into space : let’s put the deportees in a place where it’s -30°C for three days to see how long they survive before they die.” They did experiments of that nature. When a prisoner didn’t like the nurse, he gave him a Formol shot. And to be sure of the results, he did it in his heart. And Formol, for those who have done chemistry, there is nothing worse : it is what makes people die of cancer. So the Germans were scientifically very strong.

Eleventh question (Assia) : The French Resistance of De Gaulle which was set up in the aftermath of World War II, don’t you think it was a little hypocritical towards the Jewish question ? Because they still kept Maurice Papon in power, and he is a character who played a role in the genocide. 

Mr. Jacubert : Ah! This is the favorite subject of Pierre Codetti [unclear spelling], the teacher who advises us. She talks a lot about mentalities. She describes the background of anti-Semitism, what its origins are. It goes back to the Middle Ages to describe how the synagogue is represented. If you go to a cathedral, like the one in Metz, Strasbourg or even Notre-Dame, you will inevitably come across a representation of the synagogue, on the pediment of the cathedral. The synagogue is represented by a beautiful woman in a beautiful drape. Only one detail indicates that it is the synagogue : she is blindfolded. Because Jews are those who refuse to recognize the savior of the world, our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, it is from this religious source that the idea of anti-Semitism will develop. Not only are the Jews those who refuse to recognize Jesus Christ, but it is Judah, one of the apostles of Christ, who bears the name of Jew because Judah is etymologically the inhabitant of Judea, whom they recognize. He who betrayed Christ, for a bowl of soup or almost. He gives him to the Romans. So Jewish people are quickly called deicide in the Middle Ages «He killed our lord Jesus Christ so we must attack him». Then there is a second time of anti-Semitism. The more modern time. When banking and industry were developing, the Jews were the ones who had the right to trade money. For the Church, it was impure for a Christian to trade money so it was up to the Jews. This is why Jews take positions in the industry that has just been born. They are seen as owners, those who are in the banks, those who have money, those who have industries. So fatally, they were enriched at the expense of France. Anti-Semitism is moving from a religious dimension to an economic dimension. It will be used to hunt Jews «It is the Jews who have enriched themselves at our expense!». It is exactly the same approach for the Tutsi massacre in Rwanda. This dimension of anti-Semitism developed in France, was very well established with the Dreyfus case where we had a balance between the Dreyfusards and the anti-Dreyfusards. And in the end, the Dreyfusards won but the roots of evil were still there with the will to harm the Jews. It was a good tone for senior officials like Maurice Papon to do the opposite of what the Nancy police had done, that is to say that there were many who took part in the deportation of the Jews. So it is true that the Gaullist power was lenient, showed leniency towards a certain number of people who had an important responsibility. It was even said that Mitterrand himself was not above suspicion; because before he understood the meaning of history and saw that he had to side with the Allies, he had been part of the guilty government. The French governments are not above all criticism for the period just after the war. But from the 1970s to the 1980s, we will become aware of the importance of the Shoah and the attitude of the French State. This will lead to the very memorable day of Jacques Chirac’s speech in which he recognizes the responsibility of the French State in the deportation of Jews and their misfortune during the Second World War. It is a way of saying that France was not only in London or resisting, there was also a branch that martyred the Jews.

Twelfth question (Assia) : Do you think that the creation of the Hebrew state in 1947 has a direct link ?

Mr. Jacubert : Presumably. It is likely that the English would have done everything to prevent the creation of the State of Israel if there had not been the genocide of the Jews during the Second World War. I did not use the term "Holocaust/Shoah" but "the genocide of the Jews during the Second World War" because these are very important historical facts to describe, to put a correct word on them.

 

Made by Eléa Itier Laamiri