FRANCE FINALLY HONORS RIGHTEOUS GENTILES

France finally honors Righteous Gentiles (JTA)
PARIS (JTA) — Sixty-five years later, Maurice Arnoult still has nightmares about the boy and girl he couldn’t save when French Vichy police were rounding up Jews and deporting them to Auschwitz. Sitting in the tiny, cluttered shoemaker’s workshop where he has worked since 1937, Arnoult even at 98 has no problem recalling the people he helped save, and the adults and children he never saw again. Outside the weather is wet and chilly, he has a cold and is coughing, but his heart is strong.

Arnoult was among 75 righteous French people honored recently as “righteous ones” at the Pantheon, the burial ground for some of the great names in French history, in the first-ever ceremony hosted by the French government recognizing officially the Gallic French who saved Jews in France during World War II.

Former French Cabinet minister and Auschwitz survivor Simone Weil, the president of the Holocaust Foundation in France, served as master of ceremonies. Arnoult also received congratulations from President Jacques Chirac.

Marie Laure Pelosse, a Holocaust Foundation official, wondered why France waited so long to recognize the Jewish rescuers when the official lists of righteous people were drawn up years ago by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum in Israel. According to Pelosse, 240 righteous French are still alive.

“I can say that this process started in 1995, when President Chirac admitted for the first time that the French government, the Vichy collaborationist regime, was officially responsible for deporting 76,000 Jews from France,” Pelosse said.

She said the idea for the ceremony came from the Holocaust Foundation, and that the French government immediately agreed to organize the proceedings.

“Some people said it is too late for this because most of the righteous people are already dead of old age, but I don’t think it is too late,” Pelosse said. “It is late, but not too late.”