Should French railwaymen during the Second World War be viewed as great resisters or collaborators in genocide? Ludivine Broch revisits histories of resistance, collaboration and deportation in Vichy ...France through the prism of the French railwaymen – the cheminots. De-sanctifying the idea of railwaymen as heroic saboteurs, Broch reveals the daily life of these workers who accommodated with the Vichy regime, cohabitated with the Germans and stole from their employer. Moreover, by intertwining the history of the working classes with Holocaust history, she highlights unexpected histories under Vichy and sensitive memories of the post-war period. Ultimately, this book bursts the myths of cheminot resistance and collaboration in the Holocaust, and reveals that there is more to their story than this. The cheminots fed both the French nation and the German military apparatus, exemplifying the complexities of personal, professional and political life under occupation.
Only one French railway worker has been honoured as a Righteous Amongst the Nations for rescuing Jews during the Holocaust. But to what extent can one reduce the history of railwaymen, rescue and the ...deportations in Vichy France to this single incident? This article reveals the more complicated history of the Jewish but also non-Jewish deportation trains, and how it intersected with the history of the cheminots and of rescue operations between 1940 and 1944. Without aggrandizing the actions of the cheminots themselves, it seeks to rectify simplistic assumptions that cheminots failed to rescue Jews during the Holocaust.
Abstract
The Gratitude Train was sent from France to America in 1949. Conceived as a ‘thank you’ for American help during and after the world wars, it contained 52,000 personal objects chosen and ...donated by French people who wanted to express their gratitude to Americans. The objects were divided between forty-nine boxcars, and each state received one of these boxcars containing approximately 1000 objects. What where these objects? Who sent them? Why have they been forgotten? Why do they matter? This article is interested not only in the story of the Gratitude Train, but in the stories within the objects themselves. By closely analysing a porcelain dog, a silver spoon and a painting, it traces the longer life biographies and trajectories of these objects and uncovers a range of both intended and unintended emotions as well as meanings, be they collective or individual. The unique and almost completely unknown Gratitude Train collection offers valuable inroads into our understanding of the relationship between objects, emotions and international relations, as well as into the materiality of gratitude at the heart of the age of extremes.
In recent decades historians have done a lot to reveal the social and political diversity of the people who participated in the French Resistance. But little has been said about non-white resisters ...who were among the 200,000 men and women from the colonies living in the French metropole during the Occupation. This article shows that many of them were entangled in the Resistance as early as the summer of 1940 and that they became involved in the most political and violent forms of defiance. Resistance, however, was not a “natural” decision for many of the colonial workers or prisoners, whose daily struggles could bring them into tension with the Free French as well as Vichy. So, if this study aims to rectify misconceptions of the Resistance as an entirely Eurocentric affair, it also probes the complicated relationship between colonial subjects and the metropole during the war.
Why did railway workers never sabotage the deportation trains? This article examines the role of French railway workers in the Holocaust by historicising the concept of railway professionalism. It ...argues that the actions and behaviour of French railwaymen, whether blue-collar, white-collar or Jewish, were rooted in long-standing professional identities and values which were difficult to shift, even during the occupation. So whereas the professionalism of Holocaust bureaucrat perpetrators is often demonised, this article points to its socio-cultural importance and offers a more nuanced interpretation of ‘perpetrators’ in the Holocaust. Pourquoi les cheminots n’ont-ils jamais saboté les trains de la déportation? Cet article examine le rôle joué par les cheminots français pendant la Shoah en replaçant dans une perspective historique le concept de professionnalisme des cheminots. Il soutient que les actions et le comportement des cheminots français – qu’ils soient ouvriers, cadres, ou Juifs – étaient fondés dans une identité professionnelle et des valeurs solidement ancrées et difficiles à outrepasser, même pendant l’Occupation. Alors que le professionnalisme des bureaucrates qui ont activement participé à la Shoah est souvent diabolisé, cet article montre son importance socioculturelle et propose une interprétation plus nuancée des ‘complices’ du génocide des Juifs. Warum verübten Eisenbahner niemals Sabotageakte gegen Deportationszüge? Dieser Beitrag untersucht die Rolle französischer Eisenbahner im Holocaust anhand eines historisierenden Blicks auf das Konzept der Professionalität im Bahnwesen. Er vertritt die These, dass die Handlungen und Verhaltensweisen französischer Eisenbahner – unabhängig davon, ob es sich um Arbeiter, Angestellte oder jüdische Beschäftigte handelte – in einem über Jahre entwickelten beruflichen Selbstverständnis und in Werten verwurzelt waren, die sich selbst während der Besatzungszeit hartnäckig hielten. Während die Professionalität der Schreibtischtäter im Holocaust häufig dämonisiert wird, hebt dieser Beitrag ihre soziokulturelle Bedeutung hervor und bietet eine differenziertere Deutung von ‘Tätern’ in dieser Zeit.
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