The New War Movies That Say ‘J’ Accuse' to the French (Published 1974) (2024)

PARIS, Oct. 13—Early on the morning of July 16, 1942, 9,000 French policemen began a roundup of Jews in occupied Paris.

Mostly polite and reassuring, they hustled 13,000 people, including 4,500 children, all with big yellow Stars of David saying “Jew” sewed on their jackets, sweaters and blouses, into city buses.

Only 30 adults survived that “Great Roundup,” the sinister augury of many throughout France that ended in Nazi extermination camps. Not a single child returned.

Now the French are seeing it happen again, with themselves as the villains.

A Painful Film

That day is the subject of Michel Mitrani's latest creation, “Les Guichets du Louvre” (“The Gates of the Louvre”), the most painful film of 1974 for the French.

Not fiction but reconstructed history, it is part of the tardy wave of films, books and articles through which this nation is confronting—or papering over—its role in World War II. One such is “Lacombe, Lucien,” the Louis Malle film that recently opened in New York.

What has chilled French movie‐goers about Mr. Mitrani's film is that the Germans play no direct part. Nor did they in reality. The persecutors who carried out the Germans' orders were Parisians, as were the mainly indifferent onlookers and neighbors.

The true story took place in the streets, courtyards and apartments of their own capital, with on‐the‐scene footage used as documentation.

‘Unpleasant Realities’

Frangoise Giroud, the powerful columnist and new Cabinet Minister for the Condition of Women, said the “French talent for life” has' managed to, conceal the “unpleasant realities” of the Nazi occupation. She said Charles de Gaulle, who evoked the glory and the martyrdom of his wounded nation, “enabled us to erase it” and “bury it beneath the sands of memory.”

The realities became even more unpleasant, she said, by not having been perceived, discussed and faced up to in time.

She has spoken and written that “there wasn't 1 per cent of the population that joined the resistance but I swear there were 50 per cent who would have risked their necks for a pound or two of butter.”

Complicating all this in the French psyche is the current and curiously perverse trend called the “retro” vogue that romanticizes the occupation years, among other eras. It includes platform shoes and wide‐shouldered jackets that look as if the wearer had forgotten to take the hanger out.

In flea markets, young Parisians are buying second‐hand German leather coats and wartime‐era Gestapostyle raincoats.

Interviews disclosed a kind of nostalgia among young people who had never lived through the war, who are bored by today and feel they have been somehow cheated of a fascinating and demanding adventure through which their parents lived.

It can reach bizarre limits. For example, by far the most popular picture magazine In France, Paris‐Match, recently carried an article with newfound photos of daily life under the Nazis headlined: “The Retro Mode Discovers Occupied Paris in Color.”

The article began with the information that Europe was delving into its past, including “the nineteen‐forties with the mode of yellow stars for Jews and gray‐green tunics and cleated boots for men.”

Fashions and hit songs from the Occupation have been revived. And at the same time there has been desecration of French synagogues, cemeteries and the postwar Paris monument to the “Unknown Jewish Martyr,” representing millions of those murdered by the Nazis.

Michel Migram, now the venerable leader of the Jewish community in Lyons, escaped the July 16 raid and subsequent roundups because he was forewarned and then fled to the south of France.

He remarked in a telephone interview that the commemorative plaque marking the site of the torn‐down Velodrome d'Hiver, the Paris stadium where the raid victims were herded in a way‐station to death, had recently been defaced.

Mr. Milgram added though, that non‐Jews elsewhere in France, particularly in Lyons and among the poor, had been of “incalculable help” to Jews during the war.

He and other Jewish activists, including Anne‐ Marie Gentily, aged 65 and a force in the international women's Zionist organization, explained the shock of young people, both Jewish and gentile, at the passivity of Jews shown in the film.

Those who let themselves be led away by the French police without trying to hide or a struggle—even those who had heard of what had taken place in Germany—believed “it could never, happen here,” they said.

They spoke of the pervasive feeling among French Jews at the time that France was a homeland of “liberty,” of “culture,” of “civilization.”

A Refusal to Accept

The film tells the story of a 20‐year‐old gentile student at the Sorbonne who has been tipped off about the portending roundup. He wanders the Jewish neighborhoods trying to persuade people to cut off their Stars of David and come away with him to a safe place in the Latin Quarter. All refuse, except for a young girl who finally turns back toward whatever fate awaits her arrested mother and sister.

That student, Roger Boussinot, is now 52 and he waited 16 years before beginning to write the thin book upon which the movie is based. It appeared in 1960 to good re views and few sales. “It didn't interest anybody,” he said in an interview. “They wanted to forget.”

He took so long to write it because July 16, 1942, was “a day of defeat” for him. “I failed. I felt guilty,” he said. “It's hard not to succeed at the age of 20. That one girl, Jeanne, whom I persuaded briefly to think about safety with me and my friends—she left me. She would not give me her last name. I never saw her again.”

Bitter Memories

Widespread French examination of the occupation era began in earnest with the release several years ago of a four‐hour documentary film called “The Sorrow and the Pity.” Directed by Marcel Ophuts and Andre Harris, it became one of the most successful documentary films of all time in France.

Louis Malle's fictional film of the occupation in a provincial town, “Lacombe, Lucien,” appeared this year, also packing movie houses. It, unlike “The Sorrow and the Pity,” was attacked by political extremes of the left and right, and, in more recent interviews, by French Jews.

Their feeling was that it “deformed reality” by showing that almost anyone, by accident rather than design, could have joined either the resistance or the Nazi camp.

But “The Gates of the Louvre” has been judged “honest” in a way that depicts attitudes that were current among Jews and nonJews during the German occupation of France.