‘For weeks I have been tormented by witnessing these most somber events of our century (and perhaps of my whole life); it enrages me to belong to a nation that is so powerless today. . . There are moments - when one reflects upon Hitler’s flag flying over the Acropolis - of doubt that we shall ever see the victory so longed for by all free spirits. Yet there have been centuries in history when evil triumphed, when independent thinking was asleep, when moral and material progress were halted. So it is possible that Europe is now on the eve of such an age of obscurantism and misery.’ This is from the chilling diary of Raymond-Raoul Lambert, born 130 years ago today, a prominent Jewish leader during the Vichy regime.
Despite his official roles, Lambert clandestinely connected with Jewish underground resistance groups and Catholic circles that assisted Jews in evading persecution. His resistance activities included protesting against the confiscation of Jewish property by the Nazis. In August 1943, Lambert and his family - wife Simone Lambert and four children - were arrested and deported to Auschwitz where they were gassed on arrival. A little further information on Lambert’s life is available at Encyclopaedia.com.
However a more comprehensive source is the published diary of Lambert himself: Diary of a Witness 1940-1943, as translated from the French by Isabel Best, and as edited by Richard I. Cohen (published by Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, in association with The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1985). This can be read freely online at Internet Archive (with log-in), and a review can be read in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Oxford Academic. NB: Lambert is known to have kept diaries during earlier periods of his life but these seem to have been lost.
According to the publisher at the time of publication, Lambert’s diary had been among the most important untranslated records of the experience of French Jews in the Holocaust. Lambert, was, in the words of the historian Michael Marrus, ‘arguably the most important Jewish official in contact with the Vichy government and the Germans.’ National Catholic Reporter says: ‘Lambert was a complex and flawed man who was asked to take on grave responsibilities. His decisions have been, and will be, judged by history, but readers of [his diary] will emerge with respect for his courage in wrestling with the idolatry of loyalty as the reality of the Vichy regime undermines the “humane culture” of France.’
The editor of the diary, Best, states: ‘Lambert has left behind a candid, humane document of a man who firmly believed in a vision of service to his country and his co-religionists. A man of letters and action, his diary illuminates the destiny of a French Jew who struggled to make sense of a dramatically changing world while he held firm to the legacy of 150 years of emancipation.’
Here is another extract from the Best’s introduction followed by several extracts from the diary itself.
‘Written by a man who from his youth was actively engaged in the affairs of his country and the destiny of his co-religionists, the diary has no humor or levity, maintaining throughout a rhythm of seriousness and intensity. It transmits Lambert’s internal conflict and struggle to understand how his vision of France could withstand the ideological revolution of Vichy, and evokes his pain and revulsion at efforts to turn the Jews into pariahs of the society he so cherished. The diary also captures Lambert’s inability to accept this new status as it reveals his deep attachment to French literature and traditions, to the writings of Stendhal, Romain Rolland, André Gide, Maurice Barres, and so many others. Indeed, his world of associations and cultural habits was shaped almost exclusively by French writers and thinkers and only minimally by Jewish sources. Yet he felt a continuing sense of loyalty to and identification with both worlds and failed to see any point of conflict between them. Suddenly confronted with the French about-face, Lambert was left reeling and searching for answers. Thus the relatively minor role the Nazis play in his diary. For him the shattered universe he confronts is that of the historic relationship between France and French Jewry, nurtured over generations and sealed in endless forms of dedication to the common cause. Diary of a Witness is riveted with these preoccupations, making it a seminal document for the study of French Jewry in modern times in general and during the Holocaust in particular.’
12 July 1940
‘After the past four weeks, which have seen unfold the most tragic events in our history, and for me the most terrible anxieties I have ever known, I am trying to recover my intellectual balance, to regain my awareness of the passage of time. So naturally I thought of the notebooks, which, during the Great War, saved me from inertia and despair.
As an officer assigned to a central administrative unit, I was not directly involved in the fighting, but I have witnessed the disarray and paralysis of my country’s central nervous systems. I have been most dreadfully worried about the fate of my wife and our three sons, who are my whole life and my only reasons now to go on living and struggling - for even though the real danger is gone, at least for the moment, the future will bring serious problems.
I should begin by putting down matter-of-factly, as well as I can remember clearly, the details of my odyssey from Paris to Nîmes; as I owed it to myself to be during that time, I am aware of having been lucid, energetic, and concerned to do my duty.
Until June 10: Still in the technical section of the Colonial Troops, captain tor a month now (and very happy about it), stationed at the Hotel des Invalides. On May 19 I decided to have Simone and the children evacuated to Bellac, more because ot the danger of air raids than the strategic situation. Left alone in Paris, I waited. Several alarms.
Monday, June 3: At 1:30 P.M., aerial bombardment of Paris, targeting the Citroën factory, which was hit; some bombs in my Auteuil neighborhood, in Coussin Street where Lionel has been going to school. . . So the evacuation is justified and I accept the separation. One official statement after another announces disaster in overly enigmatic terms.
June 10: At 11 a.m. I go with my superior, Commandant Pascot, to the Eighth Department office of the ministry under which we work. . . They are moving out, without letting us know. They were just going to forget about us. The General Headquarters staff has already left Paris, during the night. Destination: Candé, near Blois. It’s up to us to find transportation: a dump truck belonging to one of my noncommissioned officers -he deals in fertilizer; the cars of two of our secretaries. The commandant goes to Ribérac this evening to kiss his wife, then catch up with us at Candé. I am to leave in the morning with the office things and the files.
By evening Paris is emptying out, its public buildings are dead. The winds of defeat are already blowing. At street corners women sit on bundles, waiting for the taxis, all of which are gone. At St. Lazare train station, floods of refugees. “They” have reached Pontoise and Nantes. I go on calmly arranging our departure. We [are to] meet at 8:30 A.M., unless there are suspicious noises during the night.
June 11: I awake to one of the most horrible sensations of my life, a feeling of being smothered, of dying all alone. The maid rouses me at 6 A.M.: gas attack! I open the window. Paris is drowning in a black, stifling fog that is plunging the sky and the streets into mourning. . . It smells of oil and soot, but it’s not a gas attack. It is oil fumes from the storage tanks that have been set on fire from Rouen to Bonnières, along with smoke with which the Boche [the Germans] are screening their crossing of the Seine. . . It feels like being crushed by something sinister, and I truly sense that Paris will never be the same again. This deep gloom is our defeat. In the street people's faces have black spots from the soot and eyes outlined in black. The few souls still passing by are running like crazy toward the train stations.
We leave Invalides at 10:30. I requisition gasoline from the military school. We head for Candé by the Orleans highway, which I know well. . . The spectacle there is dumbfounding, a whole people in flight. The road is hopelessly jammed: workers fleeing on bicycles, on foot, pushing wheelbarrows, cars full to bursting. . . With my lieutenant I go ahead on foot to restore some order and make a way through, but there are no longer any police or any authority that people recognize, and of course no priority possible for the military either. Lunch is in a ditch where we are forced to wait for an hour coming out of Longjumeau. By evening we are at Étampes. My second-in-command and my men sleep in the vehicles, which I have parked off the highway on a dead-end road, since it would be dangerous to keep going at night. I take the responsibility for this; we will get there when we can, and we are more than seventy kilometers [forty-five miles] beyond the enemy’s reach on the ground. For myself, in a nearby house I am able to find a free bed on which to stretch out. My experience of the previous war is serving me well; the filling station on the square in Étampes is overwhelmed but is obliged to give me gasoline to continue my journey. Senator Breton, traveling in his Bugatti, is sleeping in the open air, and there is no more bread to be found. . . I scrape together what I can for dinner with my men.’
2 October 1940
‘One of the most depressing memories of my life. This morning I read in the newspaper: “The Council of Ministers continued study and finalization of the Statut on the Jews. . .” So it is possible that within a few days I shall see my citizenship reduced, and that my sons, who are French by birth, culture, and faith, will find themselves brutally and cruelly cast out of the French community. . . Is this possible? I cannot believe it. France is no longer France. I repeat to myself that Germany is in charge here, trying still to excuse this offense against an entire history - but I cannot yet realize that it is true.’
9 October 1940
‘I am in Luchon on an assignment for the refugee committee, since I have again taken up social work in order to earn my children’s daily bread.
Here I found about a thousand unfortunate Jews from Holland and Belgium, in poverty and anguish, but the future for them looks even more fearful than the present.
The papers this morning published the decree, signed by Pétain, that has abrogated the Crémieux Decree. The Jews of Algeria are no longer French citizens. . . The Marshal has dishonored himself. What shame and what infamy! In Algeria a father who lost his son in the war is no longer a French citizen, because he is Jewish. . . So this is the armistice with honor. I am incapable of realizing that such an injustice is done, I am so ashamed of my country. Ah! if I didn’t have a wife, three sons, and graves to care for on this soil that is still French, how well I would know the way to action, to revolt and struggle for what makes life precious!’
10 May 1941
‘For weeks I have been tormented by witnessing these most somber events of our century (and perhaps of my whole life); it enrages me to belong to a nation that is so powerless today. . . There are moments - when one reflects upon Hitler’s flag flying over the Acropolis - of doubt that we shall ever see the victory so longed for by all free spirits. Yet there have been centuries in history when evil triumphed, when independent thinking was asleep, when moral and material progress were halted. So it is possible that Europe is now on the eve of such an age of obscurantism and misery. It seems that nothing on land is capable of standing up to the mechanized strength of the Reich. What then? The decision will only come on the sea or in the air, when the time comes that the United States and the British Empire can bombard the industrial centers of central Europe, day and night, until its peoples beg for mercy. I don’t see any such possibility for at least two years. And I tell myself, without being pessimistic, that it is not an absolute certainty.
The old world will not be reborn. Perhaps the victory of the evil forces will give birth, after a long time, to a new world. Can the tiny cell that my family represents survive that long, in the midst of chaos?
So I fear for the future of my children, and my fears are particularly those of a Frenchman, a French Jew. Fortunately my sons are not yet adults. What means should they be given to defend themselves in four or five years? I accept this suffering for myself, because I hope in spite of all to sec the dawn of freedom once again, but for them - I don’t want them to suffer, and I just assume they will not face debasement and discrimination. It’s a problem - such grievous cruelty that I refuse to be resigned to it for the moment. I’m either an optimist or a coward.
In view of the persecutions being initiated by the new order in France, against foreigners in general and foreign Jews in particular, in light of what has happened elsewhere, in view of racist laws and the “Commission on Jewish Affairs” being run in Vichy from Berlin, I wonder whether this collaboration won’t bring about a yet more rigorous Statut. A history of racism in France from 1939 to 194? will have to be written. . . There are days when I don’t dare listen to the official bulletins on the radio; they wound me, because I still feel French and call myself a Frenchman. If I didn't have my wife and my three sons, I should be sorry not to have “died honorably in action,” or sorry to have survived my mother.’
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