French Anti-Semitism:  A Personal Perspective with Charles Teichman

By Sara Abosch, PhD

For many people, France is synonymous with liberty, equality, and fraternity. While these concepts are certainly significant, there are other, darker issues that must also be considered when discussing developments in modern France.

France has a history of anti-Semitic flare-ups that goes back to the French Revolution [1] and continues even today. Perhaps most infamous is the Dreyfus Affair that began in 1894. Captain Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason for passing military secrets to the Germans. He was stripped of his rank and imprisoned on Devil’s Island. As it turns out, Dreyfus was unjustly convicted based on secret, falsified evidence. Over the next several years it became clear he had been tried and convicted solely because of his Jewish faith. The political agitation surrounding his re-trial in 1899 split French society and again raised the question of Jewish loyalty to the French state. [2]

It is against this backdrop that developments in Nazi-occupied, as well as Vichy, France must be considered. At the war’s outbreak, France was still divided in its view of Jews. French Jews were, for the most part, tolerated and/or accepted. However, in the interwar years France’s population of “foreign” Jews, mostly from Eastern Europe, grew considerably as Jews flocked to Paris with its bright lights and promises of liberality. [3] By the late 1930s, as xenophobia increased throughout Europe, and anti-Semitic sentiments re-emerged amongst certain segments in France, these “foreigners” were viewed with considerable hostility and suspicion.

Recently, I spoke with Charles Teichman, owner of Ylang23, and Executive Committee Member of the DHM/CET, about his family’s experiences in France. In many ways they are representative of the experience of Eastern European Jews in France. Charles’ father, Isaac, came from a religious Jewish farming family in Poland (Galicia). He was one of nine brothers and left for Paris in 1926 to pursue economic opportunity and escape persecution. The following year, he moved to Drancy, a suburb of Paris, where he met his future wife, Blima. She too was born in Galicia, in the
village, or shtetl, of Komarniki.

The Teichmans were married in 1932 and Charles’ older brothers, Simon and David, were born, respectively, in 1934 and 1935. The parents were in the schmatte business, meaning the low-end clothing trade. They were well integrated into the small Jewish community in Drancy and Isaac was a founding member of the local synagogue. When the war broke out in September 1939, Isaac, a foreign national, volunteered for the French Foreign Legion, the only French force accepting non-citizens. He was ultimately stationed in the Sahara Desert, in an almost entirely Jewish unit, led by anti-Semitic German non-commissioned officers. He patrolled the desert on camel-back, an animal he had never before encountered. Blima remained in Drancy with the two young boys, maintained their business, and did the best she could.

The war reached Western Europe in spring 1940. In June, after a brief fight, France surrendered to the Nazis. The country was then split in two, a northern area occupied by the Germans, and a southern ‘free’ area run by the collaborationist Vichy government under Marshal Philippe Pétain. Life was considerably more restricted for Jews under the Nazis, although deportations did not begin for almost two years. [4]

In August 1941, the infamous Drancy Transit Camp was opened by the Nazis in a large, former police barracks, although it was staffed by French police until 1943. It was here that “foreign” and later French Jews were interned before being deported to the East. Between June 1942 and August 1944, more than 60,000 Jews were sent to Poland, mostly Auschwitz-Birkenau, from Drancy. Of those deported, roughly 33 percent were French Jews. The remainder were “foreign” Jews. [5]

Charles’ mother and two brothers lived across the street from the transit camp in a residential neighborhood. Like most French Jews at this time, they wore the yellow star on their clothing. On July 14, 1942, a neighbor, who was also a policeman, knocked on their door and told Blima “you have to go!” When she asked “where” he responded “I don’t care…Just go!” His boys played regularly with Charles’ brothers, and this connection likely saved their lives. Two days later, the infamous Vel D’Hiv roundup began. This same policeman participated in the roundup during which more than 13,000 Jews were interned and subsequently deported to death camps. Less than 100 survived. [6]

By opening day of the roundup, Blima had already left Drancy for, Fretay, a small farming village in the countryside about 20 miles southwest of Paris. Earlier in the war, friends had told her there was a woman in the village who would take her and the boys in, if needed. This woman did so, sheltering them from July 1942 until August 1944. The woman’s one request was that Blima and the two boys help her with the farm work, as her husband was a POW in Germany and she needed the assistance.

Fretay was a tiny Catholic village with a population of around 150. In such a small place, secrets are virtually impossible to keep and the entire village knew they were there. As Charles tells it, the Teichmans “hid in plain sight.” Shortly after their arrival, the village’s mayor visited the local collaborator (again, this was a very small community) and let him know that if anything happened to the Jews, the collaborator’s family would pay. There were never any incidents. Charles believes that they were all “taught well by the local priest” and that his influence had a strong moral effect on the villagers.

The family was reunited at war’s end and began to slowly rebuild their lives. They were poor and both brothers went to work at the age of 14. The family received aid packages from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and Blima’s sisters in the United States. Charles was born shortly after the war, in 1946. According to family lore he was named after either Charles de Gaulle or a one and a half year old cousin who was deported from Drancy.

Anti-Jewish sentiment still ran high in Europe. Isaac located his sole surviving brother in a displaced persons’ camp and invited him to come live with the family in Drancy. The brother insisted on first returning to their home village of Sokoliki in Poland to see if there were any survivors. He was hanged there by his former neighbors for “attempting to reclaim property.” [7]

Charles grew up in post-war France. There, despite the recent war and knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust, he regularly experienced antisemitism. As but one example, he began first grade in 1952 and was called a “dirty Jew” by a classmate whom he subsequently “knocked on his backside.” From first grade through his graduation from law school in 1968, “not one year passed when I did not hear a “dirty Jew” comment from a classmate.” [8]

By 1979, Charles was ready for a different environment. He considered moving either to the United States or Israel. By chance, he tried the U.S. first. Shortly after moving to New York, he happened to see a television ad (one of the old slides that used to appear between programs) wishing all the station’s Jewish viewers a Happy Passover. It suddenly dawned on him that he had found the place he would settle, and that America was very different from France. Not long after, he attended an Israel Bonds event in New York where he met his future wife, Joanne. She was chairing the event and was the daughter of German Jews who had immigrated to the US.

In speaking about the current situation in France, Charles acknowledges that the old tensions regarding the place of Jews in the French nation still exist, if muted at times. [9] He also worries about the safety of French Jewry given the realities of the changing demographics in France. While he returns regularly, with his wife, to visit family and friends he has never had any regrets about his choice to settle and build his life here in the United States.