Jews of the Somme

Who is a Jew? Amiens, France, 1940-45

Between 1870 and 1940, there were no official French government records to indicate who was a Jew. When the German armies occupied the country, they issued a law, September 27, 1940, requiring all Jews to register with the police or local government official on pain of fine or imprisonment or confiscation of property. This measure defined a “Jew” as someone who was “affiliated with the Jewish religion;”  or someone who had “more than two grandparents who were affiliated with the Jewish religion.”

The law was announced on the front page of the local newspaper. The “Registry of Persons declaring as Jews,” pictured below, contained such categories as name, date of birth, place of birth, occupation, address, years of residence in France, marital status and “confession.” This last category was confusing to contemporaries.  Did it matter in the eyes of the authorities if you were a religious, i.e. practicing Jew? A few people identified themselves as “Israelites” apparently meaning affiliated, practicing Jews. Many more said they were “non-practicing” (“non-pratiquant”) or none (“néant”). A few described themselves as “Catholic,” the religion of the majority, presumably because they had been converted to Catholicism at some point. 

Throughout the Occupation the authorities constructed numerous lists and files to keep track of the movements of Jews in and out of their jurisdictions. The individual file cards or fiches shown in the next few panels of this exhibit were compiled in or around June 1942 by the police in Amiens and by local government officials elsewhere in the Department of the Somme. I discovered them on a roll of microfilm in the summer of 2017 at the Documentation Center of the Holocaust Museum in Paris. Being on the lists opened you up to various forms of discrimination and isolation and was increasingly dangerous as Jews started to be deported to the “East.”

June, 1942, when the fiches in this display were compiled, was the midpoint of the German Occupation of France.  It was also a turning point, after which matters took a calamitous turn for the Jews of the Somme. Starting in June, Jews were required to wear a large yellow star of David with the word “Juif” (“Jew”) on their garments whenever they appeared in public.

Source for fiches : Archives nationales de France (Pierrefitte-sur-Seine), AJ 38 5787

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On July 16-17, 1942, French police rounded up thirteen thousand Jews of Paris. An estimated 7,000 were crowded into an unused sports stadium, the Velodrome d’Hiver, under atrocious conditions. From there many were sent to transit camps and then to Auschwitz or Sobibor. Jews from Amiens and the Somme were rounded up, too, on July 18-19, 1942. Some of the fiches have annotations on them indicating the status of these individuals. “Interné” means they were sent from Amiens to Drancy, the camp for the Jews outside Paris. From there they were shipped in convoys of cattle cars to the extermination camps.

Non-naturalized foreign-born Jews, like the Redlichs  and the Lewenbergs, originally from Poland, and Marc Adler, from Luxembourg, suffered this fate in 1942 along with Georges Wolff from Germany and Ernest Rado from former Czechoslovakia.  Of those not arrested in 1942, many—whether native French Jews or naturalized French Jews—were rounded up between January 4-9, 1944.  This included, tragically, three children. A fourth child, Jeannine Khaiëte, arrested in July 1942, was deported with her parents in March 1943.

Some Jews of the region escaped the roundups. Samuel Obeler returned after the war to take his place on the Amiens city council.  Lucien Aaron resumed his business and momentarily the leadership of the Jewish community. Ginette Schulhof went on to a career as a philosophy teacher. Those who survived were marked forever by the loss of loved ones and the experience of radical persecution. 

I first came to Amiens in 1973 to pursue research on a dissertation on 16th century religious history. Since 2011, I have been working with government and community leaders, archivists, teachers and students in Amiens to bring attention to the history of the Jewish community in that part of France. Recently, this initiative resulted in the dedication of a memorial plaque by the city of Amiens at the site of the WW II-era synagogue.