stolen French Jewish art

This week's topic on the Radio France Culture program "La Fabrique de l'Histoire" is pillaging, despoiling, and stolen works of art. On Monday's kickoff for the week, the interviewee was Ady Steg, a surgeon, a French Jew, and head of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah . Steg was 7 when WWII began and, about 10 years ago, spurred the creation of the Matteoli Commission, which investigated works of art stolen from French Jews during the war. The interesting things about M. Steg's comments lie in his own attitudes on this question and his feelings about interventions of the U.S. Congress on this issue. Therein can be found examples of transatlantic misunderstanding, or at least of different ways of viewing the same thing.

M. Steg, first, regards the acts committed against Jews in France as crimes, but is more interested in establishing truth than in retribution. His own war story is that his family was saved by a schoolfriend and by neighbors with whom the family did not have any particularly warm relations, but who helped them when word spread that the SS was coming to round up Jews. I can't claim to be an expert on this subject. No doubt there are stories that tend in the other direction. (And there is no denying a strong, generally Catholic, strain of anti-Semitism in French society that already existed before the Germans came.) In any case, M. Steg feels grateful to what he calls the "chain" of French people who saved many Jews. According to him, two-thirds of French Jews survived the war.

Alongside M. Steg's personal story is a sidebar discussion of Jacques Chirac's brave denunciation of what is called in French "la rafle du Vel d'Hiv," or the roundup of the Vélodrome d'Hiver. This was a roundup of Jews in 1942 to a bicycle stadium, whence the victims were sent to concentration camps in the East. In 1995, Chirac used his bully pulpit as sitting President to give a strong speech apologizing for this crime. For those of you who got your information on Chirac from members of the U.S. Congress in 2002, Chirac was a conservative, a fiscal conservative whose program was to lower business taxes, work against the 35-hour work week, and in general oppose the French Left. He and Sarkozy are in the same political party.

But I digress. To return to M. Steg, M. Steg pushed for the creation of the Matteoli Commission in response to demands from Jewish-American descendants of French Jews, who had made restoration of family property a cause in the late 1980s and 1990s. These demands led to U.S. Congressional hearings in the late 1990s, before which M. Steg testified. His evaluation of this U.S. movement was: 1. the American Congressmen were apparently unaware that France had had a commission for the restoration of Jewish property from 1945-1949 that had already done a lot. His U.S. questioners seemed to be working from a belief that all this time, France had done nothing to return stolen property to Jews. 2. Following up on cases involving Swiss banks, U.S. Congressmen equated Switzerland and France. After all, those European countries are all alike. 3. The American emphasis was on restoring valuable art works, e.g. Van Goghs, and large bank accounts, that is on extremely valuable "stuff." Steg worried that this theme perpetuatesd the belief that Jews were rich, and were robbed because they were wealthy. He, in contrast, wanted it understood that they were despoiled for who they were. Not only rich people who owned valuable works of art were robbed, and not all Jews were rich. In his view, the tailor whose sewing machine was taken away deserves equal attention, and compensation, with the rich person whose Rembrandt was taken. This was what French government commissions emphasized. The importance of the theft was expressable not only in monetary terms, but in terms of human dignity. The tailor had lost his means of making a living, of exercising a craft he loved, and having a place in society. Yet the Americans seemed interested only in Rembrandts. Moreover, the American goal to get money or canvases back seemed to be the only goal, where the goal of Steg's foundation is to establish truth. Restoring property is secondary. Financial compensation is important, but it is even more important to acknowledge the wrong that was done. And actually, the tailor who lost his modest livelihood should be first in line ahead of a wealthy family who lost their Rembrandt.

This is not the first time I have seen this clash. To French eyes, American values often seem to overemphasize the $$ and miss the human. In contrast, the American Congress members seemed to view the French as heartless collaborators who did not care about the sufferings of the Jews.
As a frequent listener to French and French-Canadian radio, I hear these cultural clashes all the time. I could easily write about one a day. I will try to do something like that in this blog.


The program is available at http://www.radiofrance.fr/chaines/france-
culture2/emissions/fabriquenew/fiche.php?diffusion_id=66245 for about a month after its broadcast date of Sept. 15. You can also subscribe to the podcast, as I do.

Chirac's 1995 speech: http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Discours_prononc%C3%A9_lors_des_comm%C3%A9morations_de_la_Rafle_du_Vel

Matteoli Commission: http://memoiresvives.net/matteoli.aspx

They're all in French. Having direct access to what the people are saying is, to me, the joy of possessing another language.