“The Churches and the Shoah”, Christian responses to deportation
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How could the Holocaust unfold in a Christian Europe attached to humanist values? How to interpret the multitude of reactions of the Christian communities? The Shoah Memorial in Paris answers these questions by taking care not to fall into the trapping vision of a monolithic Church, preferring to highlight the individual initiatives of some of its members.
In the light of a renewed historiography, partly thanks to the opening of the Vatican archives, the Memorial first recounts the Christian resistance as it was actually implemented: from the secrecy of the establishments which picked up and hid Jewish children from the covers of newspapers that carried appeals from church members, exposing themselves to the risk of being targeted and arrested.
An immense debt with regard to the Churches
As if to pay homage to them, the exhibition opens with a fresco of portraits of these Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox monks who saved Jews from the death camps.
Then we discover some of the major pieces of the exhibition: the letters of five bishops, distributed in the summer of 1942 in their dioceses, a few weeks after the roundup of the Vélodrome d’Hiver. These five members of the Catholic clergy then took the floor to denounce the inhuman treatment reserved for the 13,000 Jews arrested on July 16 and 17. The first, dated August 23, is that of the Archbishop of Toulouse, Mgr Saliège (1870-1956), where he notes: “Jews are men, Jews are women. All is not allowed against these men, against these women, against these fathers and mothers of families. »
The draft of the letter from Mgr Théas (1894-1977), exhibited for the first time thanks to the competition of the ecclesiastical archives of Montauban (Tarn-et-Garonne), is strewn with numerous erasures which reveal the difficulty of the task: finding the right words to express indignation .
These letters mark a turning point in the Christian mobilization and worry Vichy, which fears having exceeded a limit and having alienated the Church. Headphones screwed on the ears, we read these letters as they were read to the faithful during the mass by the priests, in an overwhelming listening.
By also discovering the sacrifice of Father Jacques (1900-1945), who hid three Jewish children in the small college of Avon (Seine-et-Marne), before all four of them were deported, one cannot help to think of the words of Serge Klarsfeld, who signs the preface to the catalog of the exhibition: “The huge debt [des juifs] with regard to the Church of France. » They resonate as a tribute to those who courageously took a stand, while challenging their fate. ” At the grace of God “in the words of this father recognized as Righteous among the nations.
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