Phantoms of the Hotel Meurice: A Guide to the Holocaust in Paris

Psychoanalyst Mack does a solid job of summarizing the war crimes of Vichy France against the Jews in this accessible history. He begins with the history of French anti-Semitism, which predated Nazism and the depth of which partially explains French actions between 1940 and 1944. Mack, using secondary sources, then traces the promulgation of anti-Jewish legislation, including statutes aimed at enabling the French to seize Jewish assets before the Germans could. Mack does not mince words: he concludes that the “French, passively and actively, turned their country into... an outpost of Auschwitz, a supply and delivery center for the murder industry of the camp.” By the war’s end, he notes, more than 70,000 Jews living in France had died. Mack makes clear that, despite public statements by prominent politicians such as Jacques Chirac and Emmanuel Macron denouncing French complicity in the Holocaust, denial remains prevalent; for example, he notes, the website of the Hotel Meurice, which had served as the headquarters of the German Military Administration, has an extensive history section that, glaringly, skips 1940–1945. The author’s goal “to undo the obvious attempts on the part of the Parisians and the French to forget, deny, disavow, and to try to remain oblivious of the events” of the 1940s is more than met. Illus. [em](BookLife) [/em]