Eighty years ago, I was 11, I was in hiding, I had changed my name for three years. Back in Paris, I would learn that some of my closest cousins had been murdered. While understanding the anguish of survivors of the massacre who left to “take refuge” in Israel, I never thought of leaving France, a country to which my family, present for centuries, remained deeply attached. I didn’t feel directly concerned about Israel. I considered it essential to oppose all forms of racism and discrimination, the deadly nature of which I had observed.
I adhered without reservation to republican universalism, to French secularism, the only guarantee of respect for the beliefs of all. However, in France I am witnessing the gradual liberation of racist and xenophobic speech. The massacre of Algerians in 1961 is only a distant memory, and for many, the Shoah is only a “detail of History,” as Le Pen called it. But the rise of xenophobia and anti-Semitism is a very present phenomenon.
Since my adolescence, I have participated in the demonstrations that have already taken place against the crimes, wherever they come from, that racist abuses have led to in our country. A month ago, it was the massacre of 1,400 Israeli civilians that I discovered with horror. What terrifies me is witnessing the indiscriminate destruction of an entire population. When a regular army pursues and kills children and civilians, it loses all legitimacy, it erases the just reasons for its presence.
The gears are set in motion so that the very memory of the Shoah fades behind this bloody autumn. An immense betrayal of memory, the memory of these millions of deaths will fade behind what is happening at the moment. My family will have disappeared a first time in the extermination camps, a second time in the minds of fanatics ready to annihilate all Jewishness on earth. And now in Gaza, the government of Israel is destroying it a third time.
Danièle Gervais-Marx, Paris
