the children of drancy

The Children of DrancyAuthor(s): Hubert ButlerSource: The Irish Review (1986-), No. 4 (Spring, 1988), pp. 1-6Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29735337 .

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The Children of

Drancy

HUBERT BUTLER

Lately I was comparing three versions of the story of the Children of Drancy and

it occurred to me that we have more detailed information, more curiosity about

remote and now irrelevant events like the murder of the two little princes in the

Tower in the Summer of 1483 or the death of 123 English people in the Black Hole of Calcutta on 19 June 1756. Two of the writers I consulted said it was in

July, a third said it was in August that the 4,051 children were sent off to be killed

in Poland from the transit camp at Drancy north of Paris. Were they French Jews or

foreigners? Were they girls or boys? It is usually said boys, but suburban

residents on the outskirts of Paris who heard them wailing at night say they were

little girls and there is a story of a bleeding ear torn by a harried police inspector as

he removed an ear-ring.

They spent four days without food at the Velodrome d'Hiver (the Winter

cycle-racing stadium) before their mothers were taken from then, then they were loaded three or four hundred at a time into cattle trains at the Gare

d'Austerlitz and taken to Auschwitz. It is not clear that adults travelled with

them to Auschwitz. It was related at Nuremberg that an order came from Berlin

that deportees from Vichy France should be mingled discreetly with the

children to make them look like family groups. Was this done? It is not as

though dubious legend has grown up around these children as it has around

King Herod's far smaller enterprises in Bethlehem. The facts are bleak and few, and it should not be hard to find more and to iron out discrepancies. But no one

seems interested.

I believe we are bored because the scale is so large that the children seem to

belong to sociology and statistics. We cannot visualise them reading the Babar

books, having their teeth straightened, arranging dolls' tea parties. Their suffer?

ings are too great and protracted to be imagined and the range of human sym?

pathy is narrowly restricted.

Had four or five children only been killed and burnt and had it happened out?

side the Booking Office at the Gare d'Austerlitz, we would have responded

emotionally and probably their names and their fate would have been carved on

a marble tablet like that which commemorates the victims of the Black Hole out?

side the Post Office in Calcutta. And the names of their murderers would be

remembered for ever. But to kill and burn 4,501 children after transporting

1



2 Butler

them to Poland was a huge co-operative endeavour, in which thousands of

French and German policemen, typists, railway officials, gas-fitters, electricians

were engaged. It was composite villainy and when you try to break it down there are no villains, just functionaries as neutral and characterless as the clusters of ink

blobs from which a press photograph is composed. The officials who handled

the children were, we are told, deeply affected. Even the Vichy Commissioner

for Jewish Affairs, Louis Darguier, who had deported Jews in their thousands

from France, had suggested that the children be transferred to a French or?

phanage but he did nothing about it. Though Pierre Laval, the French Premier, was enthusiastic about the deportation of all foreign Jews, even those under 16, neither he nor P?tain realised that they were not going to be 'settled' in the East

but killed there.

Even at the peak of the organisational pyramid one finds duty, routine, idealism of a kind more often than sadism as the motive powers; in the interests

of a more glorious future the tender impulses had to be suppressed. At the

Jerusalem trial even the most hostile witnesses failed to prove that Eichmann, an

exemplary husband and father, had ever been guilty of wanton cruelty. These

people were really what they claimed to be: idealists whose seedy ideals would

never have germinated and pullulated in any other century but ours.

However confident we may be of the facts, there are irreconcilable divergences when we come to their interpretation. cToo much science', say some. 'Too

much literary scorn for science', say others. Francois Mauriac, who was in Paris

at the time wrote some twenty years later:

Nothing I have seen during those sombre years of the Occupation had left so

deep a mark on me as those trainloads of Jewish children standing at the Gare

d'Austerlitz. Yet I did not even see them myself. My wife described them to

me, her voice still filled with horror. At that time we knew nothing of Nazi

methods of extermination. And who could have imagined them? Yet the way these lambs had been torn from their mothers in itself exceeded anything

we

had so far thought possible. I believe that on that day I touched upon the

mystery of iniquity whose revelation was to mark the end of one era and the

beginning of another. The dream which Western man conceived in the eigh? teenth century, whose dawn he thought he saw in 1789, and which, until 2

August 1914, had grown stronger with the process of enlightenment and the

discoveries of science ? this dream vanished finally for me befqre those

trainloads of little children. And yet I was still thousands of miles away from

diinking that they were to be fuel for the gas chamber and crematorium.

Yet even at the time few thought like that. It is easier to forget about the

Children of Drancy than to liberate ourselves from the increasing control that



Children ofDrancy 3

science has over our lives. The year after Mauriac wrote what I have quoted, Charles Snow delivered at Cambridge his famous lecture on the Two Cultures in

which he claimed that the traditional culture of the past and Science the Culture

of the Future should make peace with one another. Charles Snow, a novelist

himself, addressed his lecture mainly to the 'traditional5 man of letters, scolding him for being ignorant of elementary scientific knowledge like molecular

biology and the Second Law of Thermo-dynamics. He quoted with approval someone he referred to as ca distinguished scientist5 :

cWhy do most writers take on social opinions which would have been thought uncivilised at the time of the Plantagenets? Wasn5t that true of most of the

famous writers of the twentieth century ?

Yeats, Pound, Wyndham Lewis ?

nine out of ten of those who have dominated literary sensitivity in our time?

Weren't they not only politically silly, but politically wicked? Didn't the in?

fluence of all they represent bring Auschwitz that much nearer?5 Snow scolds

Ruskin, William Morris, Thoreau, Emerson, D.H. Lawrence for their rebellion

against the Age of Science. 'They tried various fancies, which were not in effect

more than screams of horror5. Snow5s lecture caused tremendous interest. It

was published and many times reprinted. There was a three-week long cor?

respondence in The Spectator, most of it favourable to Snow. He was thinking on

popular lines. When he wrote his novels, he was Charles Snow, then he became

Sir Charles, and finally Lord Snow.

Only F.R. Leavis reacted violently. He delivered and later printed a lecture

furiously attacking Snow, denouncing him as few leading writers have been de?

nounced before. He too was printed in The Spectator and there was much com?

ment, most of it hostile. cSnow5, writes Leavis,

takes inertly the characteristic and disastrous confusion of the civilisation he is

trying to instruct. He is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be.

He thinks he has literary culture and scientific culture. In fact he has neither.

He rides on an advancing swell of clich? without a

glimmer of what creative

literature is or what it signifies. Who will assert that the average member of a

modern society is more fully human or alive than an Indian peasant?

Leavis mentions the Indian because Snow had a plan for rescuing the poorer

peoples of the world: the USA and Britain should educate ten or twenty thou?

sand cto the level of Part One of the Natural Science or Mechanised Science

Tripos5 and send them to India, Africa and South East Asia.

Could Snow not have seen that the transportation and elimination of six

million Jews also ranked among the sensational achievements of science? Anti

semitism, the idea which killed the Children of Drancy, was small and old and

had existed for centuries in pockets all over Europe. If humane ideals had been



4 Butler

cultivated as assiduously as the ideals of science and technology it would long

ago have died without issue in some Lithuanian village. But science gave it wings and swept it by aeroplane and wireless all over Europe and lodged it even in

Paris, capital of culture.

No one likes thinking on these lines, not even churchmen, who would sooner

accept the idea of the mystery or iniquity rather than forego thinking in the big

way on ecumenical or universalist lines. And yet observe how even pity can

become helpless and sometimes destructive when it is divorced from deep per? sonal concern and becomes a

public matter. Public pity forms committees, sends tinned meat, secures entry visas, but the beating of its collective heart can

be heard from miles away and it is easily eluded. Those in charge of the children

eluded it by taking them to Auschwitz. It was to dodge public pity that the

children were torn from their mothers and travelled alone or with doomed

strangers. The mothers, when their future first became known, preferring death

for their children to the lonely fate they foresaw for them, had started to throw

them down from the tops of buildings. They would have continued to do this

from the railway carriage windows and the dead or dying bodies might have

roused some dormant committees into action in France or Germany or Poland.

Something similar was happening in Free Europe. As the funds of the refugee committees swelled, the price of liberty for a Jew went higher and higher. The

compassion of the allies, turned into cash, could be used against them. In 1944

allied pity could have saved a million Jews in return for 100,000 trucks, but the

trucks would have been used against Russia, divided the allies and resuscitated

the latent anti-semitism of the Russians. Looking at the matter in this large way it was better even for Jewry as a whole that a further million Jews should die.

Because of these complexities the Children of Drancy will always remain

shadowy figures. As nursery symbols of the vast cruelty of the world we shall go on using Herod, the little princes and the Black Hole. These stories are

educative because they are about wicked men who can be punished or at least

reviled and not about that Faceless and Mysterious Collective Iniquity, against which we are powerless. It is not a satisfactory choice, all the same, because

historians now think that Herod never massacred the Innocents, that Richard

Crookback never smothered the princes and that Suraja Dowlah thought the

Black Hole was properly ventilated. No one denies what happened to the

Children of Drancy. It is because we do things in the big way that the Wicked Man has now become

so elusive and almost an abstraction. The chain of responsibility lengthens every

day; we can think of it as an immense row of Part One Science Tripos graduates

holding hands across the earth and linking together the triumphs of civilisation

to a depth of savage misery which the Aztecs, because they never discovered the

wheel, could not inflict upon their victims. Snow mentions with approval a



Children ofDrancy 5

prototype of these Tripos men, a Prussian called Siemens, a pioneer in electrical

engineering over a hundred years go. I prepare this paper by the light of electrici?

ty that was brought from the great dam at Ardnacrusha on the River Shannon by

Messrs Siemens a generation ago; each bulb had 'Siemens, made in Germany5

printed on it. In this way Siemens helped to modernise Ireland, but Ireland was

only one link in a long chain. In November 1932 Karl von Siemens used his

wealth and influence to bring Hitler to power and later his firm installed the elec?

tricity at Auschwitz, where of course it was not used just for reading-lamps and

making toast. There too as at Lublin they set up factories for the employment of

slave labour, while for their factory at Berlin Haselhaorst they bought 700

women from the SS at Ravensbruck at four to six marks a head. The directors of

Siemens were on the American list of German industrialists to be prosecuted at

Nuremberg, but probably they were all humane and agreeable men belonging to

the upper, beneficent end of the long chain; anyway, the charges against them

were dropped. On the other hand, Ezra Pound, who had on his own respon?

sibility, and not as a link in a chain, given much foolish praise to the Fascists, was

prosecuted and sentenced. Yet he had probably never killed or enslaved

anybody. It will always be so. A mischievous poet is like a thorn in the finger. He

can be pulled out. But the mischief that results from a concentration of Tripos men is like disseminated sclerosis. And that is another reason why we talk so lit?

tle about the Children of Drancy. Charles Snow is surely right when he says that most literary intellectuals are

'natural Luddites5.1 think he means that they continue to worry when worry is

useless. Ruskin, Morris, Thoreau, Lawrence, all repudiated the new world to

which engineer Siemens was devoting his genius. Should I read by candlelight because the firm that gave me electricity illuminated also the last agony of the

Children of Drancy? I don't think so. I am less frightened of science than I am of

that doctrine of the Mystery of Iniquity, which is to many the only consolation

left now that there is no traffic on the road to Brook Farm and New Harmony is

sealed off. The Mystery of Iniquity has its roots in despair, but wickedness

would no longer be mysterious if the chains of responsibility were shorter.

Science, which lengthened those chains, can surely go into reverse and shorten

them.

Fortunately there are still small communities where the Wicked Man is not yet woven so scientifically into the fabric of society that he cannot be extracted

without stopping the trains and fusing the electric light. It is not a coincidence

that two small countries, Denmark and Bulgaria, blocked the road to Auschwitz

better than any of their more powerful neighbours on the continent. Apart from

size the two countries have nothing in common. The Bulgars are a primitive, the

Danes a highly sophisticated people. They are no doubt individually as wicked as

the rest of us but wickedness still has a name and an address and a face. When the



6 Butler

rumour, a false one, went round Sofia that the government intended to deport its Jews, the citizens demonstrated outside the Palace and blocked the roads to

the railway station. In Denmark on the night of 1 October 1943, when the Jews heard they were to be rounded up, each family knew which Danish family was

prepared to hide them. Very few were caught. At the Gare d'Austerlitz the

Children of Drancy were surrounded by the most civilised and humane people in Europe, but they were scarcely more isolated and abandoned than when they

queued up naked for their 'shower-bath' in the Polish forest.

Of course, small and insignificant people also had their orgies of sin. Croats,

Roumanians, Lithuanians, Ukranians slaughtered their Jews with little science

but abounding enthusiasm, often hanging them on meat-hooks in butchers'

shops. But Iniquity in these countries was not faceless or disorganised by

brotherly love, but sometimes by caprice or corruption. But I must answer the charge made by Snow's scientist that W.B. Yeats

'brought Auschwitz nearer', because it seems to me that by focussing his mind

on distant horizons Snow made himself totally blind to what is happening next

door. Yeats deliberately chose the small community, moving his heart and his

body and as much as he could of his mind from London to Ireland, his birth?

place. For him and a dozen other well-known Irish writers Ireland has been a

larger Brook Farm, a refuge whose walls were built not by some transcendental

theory but by history and geography. For a few years our most parochial period became also our most creative. If there was in Yeats a Fascist streak it derived

from his disillusionment with the drab unheroic Ireland in which the dreams of

the visionaries of 1916 had ended. He complained that 'men of letters lived like

outlaws in their own country'. When he saw that Irish Fascism promised to be as

drab and demagogic as Irish democracy, he rapidly back-pedalled and rewrote

the song he had composed for the Blue Shirts, making it so fantastic that no

political party could sing it. He led the campaign against the Irish censorship and

in everything he did and said he was a champion of intellectual and moral and

social freedom.

In all this he was an isolated figure and even in Ireland the range of his in?

fluence was very small. But in my opinion personal and parochial efforts like his

did form a real obstruction on the road to Auschwitz, whereas its traffic was

never once interrupted by conventional weapons. The courage of the astronauts, the talents of the twenty-thousand Tripos men

are of course needed. But they must be used in reverse for breaking down link by link those long chains of atomised guilt in which the Children of Drancy were

strangled.



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