France’s complex picture of collaborating with and combating Nazis | Letters

Some young French joined the armed Milice, who worked with the occupiers, and other fought in the Resistance, says Michael Rosen. And Anthony Lodge writes on Charles de GaulleYou editorial (The Guardian view on French cinema’s De Gaulle moment: present anxieties inform a new focus on the past, 5 August) informs us that some new French films covering the second world war are coming soon. Its focus suggested that most of these films will be of a “great men of history” kind. Whatever dilemmas faced leaders in this period, it was the grandparents and great-grandparents of the majority of cinemagoers who faced life-or-death choices and, in some cases, held the lives of their neighbours in their hands.From my research about members of my family and the areas where they were living, I’ve found local policemen arresting Jewish men and women (like my father’s uncles and aunt) and handing them over to the Nazis. These gendarmes were under the command of local administrators who were “honoured” to do the bidding of Nazi commandants. But then, if you scan the Resistance memorials (often in isolated rural places), you gather that some of the names on those memorials are of Jewish and, in one example I know of, a black member of the Resistance. Continue reading...