On the last Sunday in April, a day set aside in France to honor the memory of victims of Nazi concentration camps, President François Hollande chose to address the nation from a site unique in France: the grounds of Konzentrazionslager Natzweiler-Struthof, a Nazi concentration camp located on French soil.
Until this visit, widely reported in French media, I had never heard of this place, a concentration camp complete with gas chamber, surrounded by seventy satellite work camps, most located in what is today Germany. Since 1960, the camp has been preserved as a memorial and includes a museum and the European Center of Resistance Deportees.
When the camp was first created in 1941 by order of Heinrich Himmler, the village of Struthof was located within the boundaries of the German Reich. This Alsatian village was part of France until the signing of the Franco-German Armistice in June 1940, when all of Alsace was annexed to the Reich. At that time, the French language was forbidden and soon Alsatian men were drafted into the Wehrmacht.
Until the Armistice, Strutfhof was a small ski resort with one hotel, where the inhabitants of Strasbourg, a French city on the banks of the Rhine, would go to ski on weekends. Once it became German, a colonel in the Waffen SS became interested in a vein of pink granite in the mountainside. The first deportees arrived to work in the quarries. The granite they extracted was used in some of the monuments built to honor the thousand-year Reich.
Life in the camp, as in all Nazi concentration camps, was deadly cruel. Subsisting on watery soup and a couple of crusts of bread a day, deportees rose at four, spent hours in extreme heat or cold waiting for daily roll call, and then began a twelve-hour shift of hard labor. Beatings were routine, disease rampant, death and hunger, daily companions. In all, 52,000 deportees passed through Natzweiler-Struthof between 1941 and 1945, when the last of the satellite camps were evacuated. Around 20,000 of them died.
Many of the first deportees to work and die at Natzweiler-Struthof were political prisoners or resistant fighters of over thirty different nationalities. There were also common criminals and homosexuals. In its early days, there were few gypsies or Jews.
In 1944, Jews from Hungary and Poland began filling the camp and at least 14,000 of them died. They were not, however, systematically gassed as at Auschwitz. Hard labor, malnutrition and forced marches, once the evacuation of the satellite camps began, were most often the cause of death.
Some also died as victims of scientific experimentation, and it is for that reason that the gas chamber at Struthof was built. German scientists working at the Reich University of Strasbourg used deportees in their experiments on combat gasses.
On November 23, 1944, US troops entered Natzweiler-Struthof, making it the first concentration camp to be liberated by the Allies. The satellite camps across the region continued working and killing almost till the end of the war.
In his speech at the camp, François Hollande reminded French citizens that racism and anti-Semitism are still very much with us and we have a duty to protect those who are its victims.
Today France has a Jewish population of 475,000, less than 1% of the total population, yet 51% of what the French call “racist acts,” some deadly, are directed against Jews. In March 2012, in the schoolyard of a Jewish school in Toulouse, a gunman shot and killed a rabbi, his two small sons and an 8-year-old-girl. In January 2015, during a three-day rampage of terror in Paris that left 17 dead, four shoppers were killed inside a kosher supermarket because they were Jews.
Since those attacks, the French government has put in place a program called “Sentinelle”: 10,000 soldiers joined by 5,000 police officers have been assigned to guarding “sensitive” spots in France. This includes embassies, the headquarters of news organizations, and synagogues.
In my neighborhood there are several synagogues. Since January, I have grown accustomed to seeing soldiers with machine guns in the streets.
All over Europe, anti-Semitism is on the rise. In France, Belgium and Denmark, terrorist attacks have targeted Jews and Jewish institutions. In France, anti-Semitism has also taken other forms which, while not deadly, are nonetheless violent. Jewish children are the victims of name-calling in schools; those wearing what the French call “conspicuous signs” of their religion are insulted in the streets. Within the Jewish community itself, there is a subtle pressure to camouflage one’s faith (an example would be covering a yarmulke with a baseball cap).
In November 2014, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls received the Lord Jakobovits Prize from the Conference of European Rabbis for his efforts to fight against anti-Semitism. Valls emphasizes that the enfranchisement of French Jews, who received citizenship in 1789, is one of the founding principles of the French Republic. He also warns against the danger of conflating anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, turning criticism of Israel into attacks on the Jewish population of France.
The recent deadly attacks against Jews in France were perpetrated by young men claiming to act in the name of Islam. They were all French citizens, born in France, of parents from Algeria or Mali. They were not representative of France’s Muslim population, estimated to be around 4 million, of which 2 million regularly practice their religion (these approximate figures are based on surveys conducted by the French national institute of demographics; the government does not officially collect religious or ethnic data concerning citizens). Nor were they representative of young Muslims in France today.
Yet France does indeed have a “Muslim problem,” another manifestation of French anti-Semitism if we extend this term to include descendents of Arab as well as of Hebrew peoples. Large segments of France’s Muslim population, in its majority of North African descent, have been relegated to the status of an underclass, bearing the heaviest burden of unemployment and underemployment. French Muslims are often victims of discrimination on the job market. Veiled women are victims of insults in the streets.
All over Europe, anti-Semitism and fear are on the rise. Our best bet is to learn to understand each other and to live together. Otherwise, we’ve got a lot to lose.
To learn more about Natzweiler-Struthof, readers can visit the camp’s site in English:
http://www.struthof.fr/en/home/
