paris in world war ii. the book covers daily life in the 40s of occupation the underground resistance in the city's liberation by the allies. this is an hour. >> good evening everyone. i think we would like to get started with tonight's program. we do have c-span booktv tonight filming the talk was so we are really excited about that and we are grateful that so many people will be able to see the program this evening. to that end i just wanted to ask you please if you have questions in there will be a fairly long question-and-answer period we are going to pass the handheld microphone around so you can be heard on the podium. there'll be two of us looking for you. indicate if you have a question we will come along and pass the mic. when you have it in your hand you'll be able to ask the questions everybody in the audience will hear, so appreciate your cooperating with that request. i do want to say that it's my pleasure to introduce professor and author ronald rosbottom who has read me -- recently written and released "when paris went dark" the city of light under german occupation, 1940-1944. his appearance here is presented in partnership with our local independent bookstore so thank you very much for helping us get ron to come. paris was deserted when german tanks rolled into it on june 14, 1940. within a week. was defeated and occupied. many parisians adapted to the te state of occupation by the strong united resistance movement began to build. encompassing citizens from all walks of life despite differences in politics religion age and gender. the movement which included many cultural icons and intellectuals operated under the leadership of french military officer charles degaulle. ron, the author of "when paris went dark" was born in new orleans and educated at tulane university and princeton university. when he was a student at tulane in the 60s he went to paris for the first time. while he was there he wondered what the city have been like under german occupation. it wasn't until 10 years ago that he turns his musings into a book. the result result is a big-ticket leslie research but they utilize a range of resources including diaries, interviews, photographs and film. ron has written an astute unbiased book that captures not only the dark days of paris by its citizens but the loneliness of a young german troops as we well. and we just learned today it's in the top 10 list for the national book award this year so that's really exciting and great news. [applause] ron is the one effort owns professor in humanities and professor of french and european studies at amherst college where he has served as dean of the faculty. in addition to the publication of "when paris went dark" he has published well over 100 articles and book workings, as edited three essay collections and is written to him monographs on french novelist. he lives in amherst massachusetts with his wife betty a cookbook writer so please join me in welcoming ron rosbottom to the library. [applause] >> thank you susan and thanks to elm street books for inviting me here. my wife betty is a cookbook writer and she came to come straight book a couple of years ago, and her new book and this is why i am here to provoke my wife. her new book called sunday casseroles should be back up in about a month to sign it. in fact i wanted to have anything where we could talk about casseroles for hitler. [laughter] she has much better taste than her husband. i want to thank the library. these libraries in new england are marvelous and the way they bring in people like you who are ingested in big questions in who are good readers. thank goodness there are still people who read in america, who read books. this book, what i'm going to do is just give you a very brief introduction to what i'm trying to do in the book and that i'm going to read two excerpts and then i'm going to open up the discussion for questions. i have found in speaking about this book and before it was even published that the question and answer sessions were by far the most interesting certainly for you and for me as well. when paris went dark is not an administrative or military or political or even a social history of the occupation. it is an attempt at what i have decided to call a tactile history. it's showing how it might have felt for the occupied and occupier to be on edge in a familiar environment for over four years. the book will elicit and has elicited challenging responses from professional historians because it doesn't explain so much as it shows. i show, and then i infer from a distance of three-quarters of a century what it may have been like to have lived in occupied paris. i have endeavored to give a tone of suggestiveness rather than certainty about such vexed questions as should i resist? if so, how? should i stay or leave? should i accommodate and wait or collaborate and perhaps prosper? where does accommodation fade and collaboration begin? who should i trust? whom can i trust? as the war goes on, as time passes, how do i just -- adjusts to its changes. to distill possible answers from the memoirs, letters, diaries and early histories i have read, the interviews i have had, is perhaps presumptuous yet it takes a certain amount of presumption to think one can understand human actions and emotions seven decades after they occur. but i think we must try. so let me read you two passages which i think will give you a sense of what the book is about and then if you have questions we can talk about it and if you don't have questions since c-span is filming this i will -- [laughter] in may/june 1940 as the germans raced to paris french and foreign jewish felt especially vulnerable. most just stayed put veering somehow the french government and its republican traditions would protect them from nazi racism but if you read the writing on the wall more astutely than others one was a jewish diamond merchants -- merchants whose press and enough to understand that not only was this business about to suffer, so were his wife and children as the nazis instituted the racial policies in france. he quietly procured exit visas for his family and hired automobiles to drive them from paris to the spanish border and to safety. one major problem remained. border guards all over europe have discovered how easy it was to demand bribes from fleeing and other hunted persons in the merchant knew that he would not be able to successfully carry his valuable stock of diamonds over the border and it was a stock that you could hold in the palm of your hand. he had to leave them hidden in paris, but where? taking a rather risky chance he decided to rely on a friend, a soccer buddy, a gentile. the plan he devised was audacious. heating up a large amount of lard like -- he poured the mixture into a total clear jar and then he tripled the clear precious stones into the liquid constantly stirring it as it cooled so that the jones would not settle to the bottom. soon the concoction congealed from the outside the suspended diamonds were invisible. he arrived at his friend's home holding the apparently innocuous bottle is if you work carrying a child. his friend welcomed him with the warmth he had expected after they worried together about the current state of paris and france. the diamond trader said i must leave france for obvious reasons. i am unsure about when i will be able to return but i do know that i would like to have this jar of a family remedy and an ailment for all that ails you waiting for me when i come back. it means a lot to my family into our memories and i ask you to keep it. been used his friend accepted the consignment, relieved that the request request was as simple as storing a bottle in his house. the merchant waft unburdened but apprehensive. he had outsmarted himself. should he have told this friend what the jar contains? but more immediate concerns dominated. fortunately the merchants escaped with his family was a success. making their way into and across spain they set sail from portugal to the united states where they remained for five long years. around the dinner table hundreds of times the family wondered about that apparently innocuous bottle sitting in a dark cupboard back in occupied paris. in early 1946, when the merchant could finally return he found himself once again in his french kitchen. for a while they exchange stories of the war years. after that the jewish friend broached the subject that had preoccupied him for half a decade. do you recall that jar that i left with you in june of 1940? at first his friend looked puzzled. jar? and then he remembered it had not crossed his mind since his friend and love. getting up to the table he rummaged around in a remote cupboard mumbling i hope we can throw it out when we moved things around during the war. the merchant politely waited, his guts in a not. i found it, i think. is this its? oh yes the merchant answered holding it once again as if it were a main face. now i have a story for you. could you light up your stove and get me a sieve and a pan? in the contents of the jar were bubbling away over a little flame. taking this is the merchant toward the to the merchants poured the pots contents into another container and they are nestled in the mashed was his diamond reserve, the gem sparkling as if they had never been covered with animal fat and south. the grateful merchant selected the brightest and largest diamond from the pio and handed it to his speech was host. take this one for your dear wife. the story was told to me by the son of this man. now i want to move to another side of the story and that is how did the germans feel? one of the themes that i tried to illustrate in my book is what it was like to be an occupier, what it was like to be a young german officer in a city that the germans definitely respect respected? and a city where the parisians as we know are not always the most welcoming people even if you are german occupier were less than friendly. and so this is an anecdote written by an officer whose job had primarily been to, he had been sent to paris. he was a very intelligent man and new french quite well and has bought -- jobless to censor publication to make sure that a there were no jews involved and b there were no anti-german anti-nazi in them. his name was gerhardt heller. an assertive knock brought madam heller to her apartment door. it was november of 1940 in and the germans had been in paris for five months. she had grown used to seeing them in the streets but she was stunned when she saw unrelenting a man in uniform, a lieutenant. quickly she called her husband. what could he possibly want with them? the officer politely asked if this is where certain younger power lives. they answered yes but told their unnerving visitor that their son was presently a prisoner of war. the germans had over 1.5 million french soldiers as prisoners of war. the german officer introduced himself as gerhardt heller who had known their son while he was studying medicine in germany. he, the frenchman was studying medicine and journey. coincidently they had the same family name and they had bonded because of it. heller told the couple that he was new to paris and that their son was the only person who they knew to call on. the parisian colors were confused. their son had never spoken of another student named heller. at any rate he was not there and would not be for a long time. they did not invite gerhardt in or show any interest in his story. lieutenant turned away, still alone and with the jurgens called to the city without a gaze, the city without a face. lieutenant heller for counts the anecdote in his memoirs published in france in 1981 reminding us of the other side of the occupation. of course we have to consider his memoirs with care. we are not reading contemporary documents but the memories of a man who wants to present himself as a sympathetic educated highly literate and generous man. nevertheless his book presents anecdotes that help us to understand further the anxieties that affected many of the reich's best officers. heller was obviously a francophile and at least 40 years later and anti-nazi. an impermanent wehrmacht bureaucrat he was charged with the unpleasant task of preventing the publication of french literature that would be construed as inference by jews. the physical result of this responsibility was a huge warehouse in paris where thousands upon thousands of books were destroyed or left. he found himself trying to keep french literature vibrant and respectable on the one hand while on the other using the blunt knife of censorship to chop away at originality and imagination. soon after arriving we had to accept that he was an outsider. no matter how much of a francophile he considered himself. he was not a tourist, not an innocent bureaucrat but a stranger, one who made the parisians uncomfortable. he recalled how relieved i felt each time i could dress in civilian clothing especially after having to wear uniform all day. the germans spent a great deal of their free time in the bath houses and swimming pools of paris for the same reason and a swimsuit writes 101 could tell the difference between a german and a frenchman. he discovered that even his accent could be construed as swiss rather than german. heller and his cadre tried to separate themselves from their fellows not only in attempts to pass as french but also perhaps as a mild form of rejection of the nazi presence. this is very important. not all germans participated in the occupation were nazis. he says one does not conquer paris but is conquered by paris. i lived then always alone in a state of disarray and anguish. how not to carry in one's mind were within one's body the marks of such tension when one knows that the gestapo is spying on you, that your comrades are your superiors suspect you. your conscience becomes dislocated. at one point heller learns of a young parisian bourgeois who offers his services to to germans and the rights live on the street adjacent to the sean alicia lee. arrange just under the roof of the building a little park completely separated from the lower floors. it was tastefully furnished, wood paneling and antique furniture. he carried on there with a group of french and germans and opera hall in particular whiskey, that is scotch. i went up there several times to taste the legs of lamb he had gotten from the countryside. at the very end of the occupation the same french friend would offer heller a secret room near his own isolated apartment where the german could stay until things calm down. afterward he naïvely argued the german could resume his parisian life. heller tells us the story is an illustration of how friendly with each other many upper-class parisians and germans were. the frenchman was not collaborating but simply trying to help a friend who just happen to be a key member of the occupation forces. more interestingly, this anecdote reveals how secret of paris was was during his period. everyone parisian occupier thought of a rabbit hole they could use in case things got worse. air raid shelters the concierge basements, attics outdoor sheds sewers metro stations relatives apartments or homes in the country. at the end of this memoir heller leaves us with an anecdote that can serve as an epilogue for the anxiety of the occupier. this he contemplated the loss of the war and in anticipation of burning -- returning to a devastated germany. at night is only a german officer could heller would often walk through the gardens in the lower reaches between -- during the day then and now the day then and now. these are playgrounds for children in the area. sites of markets, kiosks and toys in newspapers, public conveniences and chairs for senior citizens out for fresh air but it might under wartime curfew with few vehicles in the streets, these spaces were empty and silent. in these gardens strolling at dusk heller had a strange encounter. it speaks volumes about the loneliness he felt in paris as well as about the patronizing attitude that many germans took toward their french charges. heller had noticed movement in the bushes and when he approached he found a girl hiding behind them, a french girl. you had best get home he said. the curfew will catch you outside and you could be picked up. she explained that she had missed her train and she lived in the country and that she had nowhere to stay in paris. she was hiding until the curfew was lifted in the morning when she would catch the first train back home. heller took her to his hotel and asked the concierge to sleep in the lobby until the next morning. the girl left early leaving a note for heller. she had gotten his name from the concierge, thanking him and promising to call later and she did. for several months the two would have dates, bicycle rides in the country, walks in paris, café moments. what was her name he writes, who was she? i never knew. those seem to what i heard when she mumbled her name. i gave her the name which means little queen. she was for several months until queen accompanying me to the end of the road for a world that each day became heavier and darker. heller ushers his reader that he never laid a hand on the girl. they maintained a respectful distance that they do skinny dip in the country stream. for him and it was an innocent idol but he describes her in terms that reveals his sexual attraction to her. and then she disappeared and he never saw her again. a year later in november of 1943, a time when there was a fear that germany had lost any initiative it had earlier gained in winning the war hell are met another teenager in the same garden, this time the boy. a similar sort of attachment evolved. we showed a lot of tenderness toward each other. he would take my hand while we watch. we embrace when we met. nothing more and our rendezvous lasted until spring of 44, just a few months before the liberation. p. too disappeared forever. heller's anecdotes at the very variant of this memoir speak to the loneliness sexual and psychological that often enveloped the occupier. paris had proven for this german at least to be the decadent sirens so feared by nazism. but by defending children perhaps he thought he was sanitizing his sexual loneliness. loneliness, suspicion and later the threat of assassination weighed heavily on those senior officers and bureaucrats stationed in paris. heller recognizes as to similar memoirs that the city underneath was like a hidden wasp's nest. the sound of the constant unidentifiable buzzing kept everyone on edge. heller would refuse the offer of his french friends but he would leave a piece of himself and paris. under a tree on the great espionage that leads to -- he buried a 10 box filled with notes and a diary. in 1948 he and returned for the first time since the war. but he never was able to find his buried treasure. like so many of his compatriots a part of his past lay hidden in a resurgent paris. thank you. [applause] so my book is replete with anecdotes like that, anecdotes found through memoirs that i found in interviews that i had with people. and newspapers etc.. what i tried to do in this book is to show how complex the occupation was. it was not just black versus white but very in terms of moral and ethical issues but very gray and you have to be careful when you are reading about the memoirs of germans who survived the war and survived the suspicions of being in the fairmont. that is the quarrels of the gestapo and that it is us. you have to be suspicious but there still was a tom that many folks have known for germans, did they feel lonely bless their little hearts? but there was still an element of that confusion in the german psyche as well as the french psyche which i bring forward in this book. so i'm more than happy to read more anecdotes but i really really would like to have u.s. questions about this period and let's see how that goes. thank you. yes sir. remember you are supposed to raise your hand and someone is going to give you a microphone. here's a gentleman right here. >> hello. can you hear me? >> i can hear you. i i don't know if c-span can hear you. >> could you have done a similar book about another human/nazi occupation for example warsaw and come up with similar anecdotes etc. similar feelings in any windows? >> without a doubt, without a doubt in people i've asked that question. .. the next story i chose, i think the more convincing. i've got two microphones up here and one here, and for some reason, they keep adjusting them. but anyway, that's a very good question and i've been asked that. what about amster dom, copenhagen, rome? and my answer is that paris was -- i'm prejudiced but i am also historian. paris was special. and paris wasn't touched. they walked into tear -- paris without a shot being fired. this gentleman back here. >> if you could talk for just a minute about the parisian women who collaborated with the nazis. there's famous images of the women being marched through the streets after liberation with their heads shaved. can you talk about their motivation and what happened afterwards. were they able to resume a normal life as french women or were they stigmatized for a long time? >> let me -- the last part of the question is easier to answer. yes, they were stigmatized but were eventually reassimilated into society. many of them were treated unfairly, and people knew that. women had a major role in the occupation because most of the men were in prison and, therefore, paris, which has always been considered a feminine city, was even more feminine at this time. it was the mothers who had to wait in line, had to have jobs and secure the children, and in -- this was an occupation, which means that there were many, many jobs that a young woman would get, working for the german occupation. a stenagographer or working in a cafeteria or in a canteen or -- some other way innocently, innocently just trying to make an income. and also women slept with german soldiers. the estimate is somewhere around 200,000 or 300,000 little fritzes were born during this period. they were called little fritzes. the poor children suffered. many people -- many young women went off for eight or nine months and then came back home, either having left a child someplace, or left the child with a relative. so, there was a lot of -- if you can call it that innocent sexual relations between young people. i mean, after all, many of these young women were teenagers and many of the young german soldiers were teenagers or early 20s. that's a whole other story that deserves a lot of attention. when the liberation came, everyone wanted to be on the side of the liberators. everyone was suddenly a member of the resistance. everyone wanted to get even with whoever it was who had caused them to have a horrible life. also, people wanted to get even with miss dupont because she had run a nice restaurant and made some money from the german soldiers who went to to restaurant, and somebody wanted to get even with another woman because she had been nice to some german soldiers, been seen walking down the street with german soldiers. so there was all kinds of petty reasons and there were real reasons that women wore suddenly dried in a kangaroo trial. tattooedtattooed of swastikas o. no win were shaved and walked down the street. it was mostly men and neighbors who did the shaving. very, very complicated time. it embarrassed americans to the point where the allies had to instruct american soldiers to stop it if they could. it was so embarrassing to see this happen to -- especially to married women and young girls. by the way, prostitutes were not shaved because they had a reputable profession, only doing their job. it was those who had been intimate and in business or in any other way with the germans. for a while, some of these poor women had to leave their villages. happened in villages as well as city. some poor people had to leave and then come back later. some were immediately received because they found that the reasons are not justified, and others left and never came back. and probably the most startling photographs are those photographs of women being shaved. some of them they paraded nakedly. some they shaved every part of hair on their bodies. some of them they had to wear signs. it was not a pretty time, and it was primarily massogeny run amok. >> considering the nazi proclivities with regard to thard world, can you tell us about what happened with the museums and the galleries and private collections in paris? >> the nazis were great to put it politely, collectors. they had already sent couriers in the '30s through europe to museums to take a census of any painting that could have been -- that had been stolen from germany 100 years ago or 200 years ago, any painting that was german or flemish, some great flemish artists in the renaissance. they knew where every painting of any importance in every museum they took over was. every painting they could justify was of germanic origin was going to immediately be taken back to germany. hitler planned this enormous museum in minsk near where he was born in austria. number one. number two, they knew the great collections of the jews. the jewish -- the owners of the great jewish galleries in amsterdam and all of the these cities, they went right there almost immediately after arriving they went right there to take the paintings out. didn't make any difference what they were. and they sold a lot of these paintings on the open market in switzerland in order to get cash for the third reich. besides that there was a art they've thought was degenerate, influenced by jazz or africans or african-americans and a lot of that art was taken and put into the museum -- used to be the museum of contemporary artists, now moved to paris, and there they burned a lot of it, but they also were very canny and especially gathering took a lot of it himself. i think he made something like -- i forget the number -- 20 for trips on his special train to paris during this period, and took back a lot of art. fortunately a woman who worked there kept track of every piece of art. the film "monuments men" is the story of this. one woman was canny, keeping track about it. >> but their taste in art was terrible. no taste. after tall, hitler loved wagner. but a lot of the germans were meche cannier about the art and about the potential value of the art. one of the interesting things -- you didn't ask this question, but just want to digress -- picasso stayed in paris. he painted a painting for the exposition in 1937 in which he attacks the germans and italians for having bombed a little town and wiped out so many innocent people. and the germans, many germans consider him to be a jew. he was darker skinned. he was certainly spanish. he may have been a communist. he did become a communist briefly after the war but he wasn't. and he stayed, and that's one of the interesting stories. we're going to learn more about this in a few years. why did he stay? he wasn't the world's most courageous men but was one of the richest and well known and his reputation, particularly to the point where germans visited him and went to visit it today -- went to his studio in paris, and they raided his lock box where he had mattieces and other artwork but they didn't steal from him. and many people said why? i think there was a -- there were two types of -- several types of german attitudes toward art, and he basically -- there's a famous story, whether it's true or not i don't know but was in his studio, because he kept it. he later sent it out during the war all over the world to keep the germans from getting it. but one german pointed at it -- may not have pointed at the painting but pointed at a big photograph othe painting and said, did you do this? and picasso said no,out did. but the germans visited him and protected him him was never arrested and survived the war without any undo differ comfort. but the art now -- the lourve had been emptied by the french before the germans got there, mona lisa was spirited off. many great paintings spirited off. when the germans got to the lourve there was nothing there but boring statues, and empty walls and frames. and, for instance, when hitler made his tour he didn't stop at the lourve there was nothing to see. the germans knew where most of the stuff was, but many of those museums in europe had been emptied because the europeans realized after the bombing of madrid in the 30s that museums were very vulnerable to air attack and so many of the great museums, the tate gallery, the national gallery, the lourve, et cetera, were emptied, spread out all over the country because of the fear of destruction. yes, sir. this gentleman here. or that gentleman there. >> albert camoo, another artist -- >> can you snaer. >> yes. >> albert camoo. obviously a writer, he stayed in paris during the war? >> no. part of the time, yes. >> do you include in your book how the war affected him and his outlook on life and his later writing, and did he participate in the resistance at all? >> guest: that was a good question. he tried to get out of france. he was an algerian. considered himself an algerian. french born, french family, but considers himself algeria, and wanted to get back there. he wanted to get out of france and did for a while. he suffered terribly from tuberculosis. finally got back into france. his doctor recommended he go into the highlands. he went there and -- but in 1942 published two of his most famous books. the the first was a stricken -- stranger, and then the second was a document about suicide and whether it makes sense to commit suicide. and he published both -- the only thing he had to take out -- was a reference kafka because he was jew. but otherwise the book wag published and he was brought back to paris to be fêted, and he came back and went back down leon to breathe better, and then toward the end of the occupation he went back and joined an underground movement, which published a newspaper and he was very, very active in resistance movements at the end of the war and certainly after the war became a major editor about everything from collaboration to resistance. he published in 1948 a book called "the plague." about the pest, about the bubonic plague in algeria, and that is, as far as i'm concerned, that isn't an al gory -- -- for the occupation of france by the germans. it's major novel about what we do when faced with evil and we're locked inside a city, because what the algerian does in this novel is close the city off so that the plague doesn't extend, and so that people won't be coming in and spreading it. so what do you do when you're closed off from the world, and there's an evil that you can't really combat. how do you deal with death? how do you deal with illness? how do you deal with those moments in your life when you have to make major moral decisions about, die report that my child has the plague in order to keep it from spreading, et cetera? so i think it is one of the great -- probably the greatest writer about the moral and ethical complexities of living under occupation. >> could you help us explain what it was like for the jews under occupation? i know it's a very big topic but i don't think we all know exactly what it was like. >> i didn't know a lot either before i started. i tried not to make this book about the jewish experience, although it was a major chapter in the book about the jewish experience, because i wanted to show that the jews weren't the only ones who lived in this environment of anxiety and tension, demoralization, ate, but there was no doubt that they were the targets of nazi racial policy. we first have to recognize there were two kinds of jews. immigrants, many of whom had fled pole land and -- poland and germany during '30s and gone to paris, which is seen as the sight of human freedom, and back to -- french were the first nation to give full civil rights to jewish citizens in 1793. right to vote, right to own property, et cetera. so, the french had this reputation. french jews felt confident their country would protect them. many of them were imprisoned in the camps. the immigrant jews were, of course, very nervous and apprehensive, that's should be, and at first the effort -- the germans are very canny. the effort was to round up only immigrants and foreign jews especially german jews. but it became quite clear right after the government was founded, because if you remember, the french signed an armistice, the only nation to sign an armistice with germany and was allowed to keep about half of its geography under french control. roughly from 1940 to 1942. and they began passing antisell -- antisemitic laws before the germans citied them to so there was antiseptember time in paris as there was in all of europe. anti-semitism is not a french disease. and at first, the french jews thought they would be protected. the rich jews thought the germans were only interested in the riffraff. the poor jews throughout the germans were only interested in rich jews. there was a lot of tension the jewish community. there were many jews who had become so assimilated, like they had been in germany, they didn't even remember they were jewish. they needed these racial laws to be passed to be reminded that in fact they were. it wasn'ting in -- so there are some roundups but generally french jews were spared, mainly because the germans did not want to upset the french government because they needed the riches of france for their war machine. france was by far the richest nation in europe, and they were stealing everything. locomotives, horses, cattle, wheat. they didn't want to ticket back to germany for their war machine. they didn't want to have a huge uprising. and then the germans made a very bad mistake, i think the biggest mistake they made during the war, occupation, and that is they imposed the wearing of the yellow star in june of 1942. by every jew, french or foreign. over the age of six. every jew had to wear the same size star. there weren't little stars for little kids. same size star for every jew. and so see the children -- you can still see the photos -- to see those yellow stars -- the government, to its credit, refused to impose the yellow star in occupied france. i say to its credit because it's not totally to it credit. i didn't want to tick off their population, either. but i think frenchmen finally began to realize they couldn't hide anymore. every time you met someone with a yellow star you had to make an ethical decision. thumb's up, do i smile, do i speak to them. many gentiles write, i didn't know they were jews. they lived next door. they're jews now. and so -- for the first time this catholic church, six bishops of the catholic church, spoke out against the outsiding -- rounding up of dish especially children and women, not bet the jews but children and women. not the catholic church per se but many of the french leaders, but took them until 1942 to do that. that -- seeing all these perfectly normal frenchmen -- i'm talking about the jews that come from eastern europe. i'm talking about people who had lived in france for 200 and 300 years as well as people from eastern europe. walking around with yellow stars, seeing little kid goes to school with yellow starts. maintain every family had to deal with this issue, every gentile family had to deal with this issue. mommy, my friend has a yellow star. what does that mean? or the little jewish boy saying, mommy, what is a jew? why die have to wear this? that changed attitudes, and the german racial policy became obvious. people were saying, there but for the grace of god go i'm other. a pros -- protestant. i'm a muslim. maybe they'll do that to muslims.

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