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Micah Reader in January 2021 by Brenda Levenson
Françoise Frenkel’s diary was first published in France in 2015 and found in Berlin many years later in a used books shop. For nearly twenty years, the author owned a book shop dedicated to works in French, drawing a sizable group of customers. She had studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and was fluent in the language.
The Nazis now governing Germany, Frenkel left Berlin in the early 1940s, ending up in France after a short visit with relatives in Brussels. The rest of her diary tells much about the help she received from ordinary French men and women she comes across through her travels around the country, in cities that would but were not yet occupied by the Germans.
The book elicited a lively and interesting discussion that left little untouched. Our readers commented on the fact that Frenkel says little about her personal life, with few exceptions when she alludes to the wealthy family from which she comes, but nothing about her husband. Several among us observed her “lack of emotion,” which actually adds to our understanding of the events she describes. She is intent to focus on history and the events that followed Germany’s occupation of France. She wants to describe the facts, what and how things happened. Those who lived through the times that Frenkel covers remember only one emotion, fear. Fear of being arrested and deported, about death, no matter the age of the victims. The sight of a German soldier in uniform, standing in the metro, was enough to instill terror. Several among us commented on the “gratitude” that Frenkel expresses in her book about the men and women who helped her, barely knowing her, but fully aware that she was Jewish, and not expecting rewards of any kind. “Like so many French people, [she] vehemently opposed the government’s actions and the horror taking place in the country. I was the beneficiary of one generous gesture after another!” she writes.
The French had a way of expressing their feelings about the Germans, as one elderly man once in the metro got off his seat, offering it to a pregnant woman whose coat visibly held the yellow star spelling “juif” (Jewish), a German soldier standing by, observing the meaningful scene.
In France, 75% of Jews survived the Holocaust, against 25% in Holland, the country of Ann Frank. There were collaborators of the Germans, but the Resistance movement of the French was estimated to have included 5% of a terrified population. Without the help of the Resistance, the landing in Normandy in August 1944 of the Allied troops and of the French who had fled to England with general de Gaulle would not have been possible, as Winston Churchill remarked.
Temple Micah Book Club 