On February 7, Sarah Gensburger, coauthor of the new book Appartements témoins : La spoliation des locataires juifs à Paris, 1940-1946, talked us through its account of how ordinary Parisians and the French authorities collaborated in the dispossession of Jewish tenants – including after the war, when many Jews returned to Paris and tried to reclaim their homes, only to find they had been appropriated and awarded to non-Jewish tenants under a war-time law ratified by the succeeding post-war French republic. Sarah and her coauthors Isabelle Backouche and Eric Le Bourhis found a hitherto unnoticed archive, which allowed them to reconstruct these forgotten processes.
Sarah said that the prevailing thinking among historians of the Occupation is that the French population was more anti-German and sympathetic to Jews than were the Vichy authorities. The book’s findings suggest that the truth is darker.
Sarah received us at Sciences Po, where she works as a sociologist of memory and an historian of the Holocaust. There was a sizeable turnout: 23 AAPA members in the room, and five on Zoom. The book is out in France on February 20, and Sarah anticipates an English translation soon
