Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (81 page)

Catholics all over Europe were being taught powerful lessons every time the Vatican rebuilt the gates of the ghetto, what Cardinal Cassidy has called the "antechamber" of the Nazi death camps. And the Church-enforced ghetto, far from being an item of ancient history, still stood, in sight of the pope's window, down to the year my grandfather was born. As he grew up in Ireland, then made his way to America, he'd have known, as his whole generation would have, that the Roman Catholic Church had firmly set itself against the Jews of Europe.

Compared to developments in, say, central and eastern Europe, where Jew hatred continued to have overt, widespread manifestations, anti-semitism collapsed as a political force in France after 1906, when Dreyfus was vindicated. Antisemitism did not continue to define reactionary attitudes, nor did it find expression as the dominant concern of the Church, into the twentieth century. Yet the extremes of Drumont and
La Croix,
and a Catholic readiness to benefit from them, had flourished for just the wrong period of history. An irrational readiness to suspect the Jew as the original source of disorder bore the imprimatur across a generation, and before that generation passed, its readiness to suspect the Jew in that way would be quickened and exploited by the propagandists of National Socialism.
⁵

The Dreyfus affair—with the crucifix on the military courtroom wall, with the perjurer Colonel Henry swearing on the crucifix, with
La Croix
leading the charge, with the Church hierarchy silent and an anti-Semitic priesthood unrestrained, with the face of Christ portrayed as turned against his own people—offers a crucial lesson for those who revere the cross. For once, the connections between Catholic theology and Catholic power, and the negation of Jews that both assume, are clear. And as we have seen repeatedly, the connection between the cross of Golgotha, as misremembered in the Christian narrative, and that negation is anything but incidental. Georges Bernanos (1888–1948), the French novelist, a reactionary himself, nevertheless summed things up, writing in 1931: "The Dreyfus Affair already belongs to that tragic era which certainly was not ended by the last war. The affair reveals the same inhuman character, preserving amid the welter of unbridled passions and the flames of hate an inconceivably cold and callous heart."
⁶

46. Lucie and Madeleine

A
FIGURE WHO
bridged "that tragic era," felt its inconceivable cold throughout, and carried in her own experience the direct links between
La Croix
and the "Golgotha of the modern world"
¹
was Lucie Hadamard Dreyfus. Twenty-four years old when her husband was first arrested, a pampered wife, she was in no way prepared for what was to come. Yet as Michael Burns's stirring account reveals, she drew on a depth of courage and savvy intelligence that enabled her to save her husband and steady her family through a tumult that never ended.
²

When Dreyfus was sentenced to Devil's Island, Lucie sought authorization to accompany him.
³
She was denied, but allowed a visit before his departure. She wanted to hold his hand. The prison warden, fearing a secret communication through a "cabalistic sign," refused to permit it. When Dreyfus was shipped off into exile, Lucie immediately wrote a letter that she hoped would arrive at Devil's Island before he did. "Take quinine as soon as you feel feverish," she wrote, displaying the research she had done. "And moderation ... I know that you neither eat nor drink too much, but don't work too hard; it seems that for Europeans who are not accustomed to hard labor, it's the most dangerous thing they can do ... Above all, write to me, that's all that I desire."
⁴

More than a year later, in 1896, she wrote, "I am strong, my dear Alfred, so have no fear; when you feel most discouraged, most sad, tell me all your thoughts and describe all the bitterness in your heart."
⁵

"My thoughts never leave you for an instant," Dreyfus wrote back to her, "neither during the day nor at night, and if I listened only to my heart, I would write you every moment of every hour."
⁶
As it was, the couple exchanged hundreds of letters.

Lucie wrote letters to every person of influence she could think of. She remained at the center of the Dreyfus family's unflagging effort to get the case reopened. Some, like Hannah Arendt, would later criticize the family for being too deferential, too reluctant to raise a furor or challenge the military directly,
⁷
yet Lucie and her brother-in-law succeeded in recruiting an ever-wider circle of supporters, including Zola, who would do just that. In 1896, nearly two years after her husband's arrest, Lucie wrote a letter to Pope Leo XIII. With the help of a friend, she drafted it in Latin. "The wife of a Captain of Jewish extraction," she wrote, seeks in all humility the "pity and compassion of the Father of the Catholic Church." As Burns summarizes the letter, she related what had happened to Dreyfus, then added, "Christians were beginning to greatly fear that anti-Semitic prejudices have had to do with this affair." Perhaps displaying the spirit of ingratiation that would offend Arendt, she described herself as kneeling before "the Vicar of Christ ... just as the daughters of Jerusalem had turned to Christ himself."
⁸
Lucie might have known of this pope's relative liberalism. She might have sensed in him the thing that, two years later, would lead to a denunciation of antisemitism; Arendt credited Leo XIII with stopping "the 'grand strategy' of using antisemitism as an instrument of Catholicism."
⁹
But on Alfred Dreyfus the pope maintained a strict neutrality,
¹⁰
and he never answered Lucie's letter.

An anti-Dreyfusard broadside that appeared in Paris the same year announced, "How the Dreyfus Affair Will End." All of Israel, it said, "will be chased from France, disappearing in a cloud of dust and smoke ... engulfed forever. It is the ruin, the death, the horrible slaughter of a race butchered by the hatred it had created across the centuries."
¹¹

Alfred Dreyfus died in Paris in 1935 after a long illness. Lucie had nursed him through his decline. In 1940, as the Nazis closed in on Paris, a million Parisians fled the city, tens of thousands of Jews among them. Lucie was now a woman of seventy-one, slowed by age and respiratory illness. Nevertheless, without hesitation she packed what she could carry and left the city with other members of her family, including her granddaughter Madeleine Dreyfus Levy, a twenty-two-year-old social worker. The family traveled in several automobiles, in tandem, until they finally had to split up. Lucie's two grown children, their spouses, and her eight grandchildren dispersed through the south of France. For a time, Lucie took refuge in the crowded city of Toulouse, moving into a single room in a boarding house. Madeleine was nearby, living with friends. For two years, Lucie worked to stay in touch with her scattered family—sisters, in-laws, children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews. Mainly, she wrote letters. But then, even as the anti-Jewish campaign of Vichy intensified, she began to travel, to visit them. Careful not to draw attention to herself, she stayed in cheap hotels. She wanted to be a source of encouragement for her loved ones, as she had been for her husband. A practical woman, she had brought a large supply of cash with her from Paris, money she now used to keep her relatives safe. "Don't worry about the question of money," she wrote to her granddaughter Simone. "Tell me what you need and I will send it."
¹²
Madeleine returned to Paris, then went back to Toulouse. Lucie supported her as she joined the Combat underground group, helping to smuggle fugitives out of France, via the Pyrenees, into Spain.

But in 1942, Lucie's relatives began to disappear. The roundup of Jews had begun in earnest. "The world has gone mad," Lucie wrote that summer. "We have lost our way in the midst of all these massacres, of all this universal unconsciousness."
¹³
Most members of the Dreyfus family would make their way to the United States or England. One who refused to leave was Madeleine. Determined to stay with the Resistance, she remained in Toulouse. By now, as Burns tells the story,
¹⁴
all three of Madeleine's siblings had joined Resistance organizations, a risky venture for anyone, but especially so for these members of the best-known Jewish family in France. Lucie, for her part, also declined to flee. It is easy to imagine her wanting to stay near her courageous grandchildren.

As the pressure mounted in 1943, she began using the married, non-Jewish name of her sister, Duteil. Lucie's sister arranged a contact with a Catholic convent in Valence, a city in the southeast of France, on the Rhone River south of Lyons. Valence was a Roman settlement, on the route that Constantine would have followed in travels to and from Trier. There was another connection with that mythic center of this narrative's geography. At the time Lucie was hiding in Valence, the Jews of nearby Lyons were being terrorized by Klaus Barbie. Barbie, as we saw, was born and raised in Trier, graduating from the same school as Karl Marx. In Valence, Lucie was known only as Madame Duteil, even to the nuns in whose convent she now began to live.

Madeleine, meanwhile, refused to leave her rescue work in Toulouse, helping more and more Jews out of France. Eventually, after a curfew violation, she was arrested, and the police kept her in custody, "because of her name."
¹⁵
She was taken to Drancy, outside Paris. This was the transit camp from which more than seventy-five thousand Jews were deported to death camps. It was at Drancy, now the site of a workers' housing block, that the Roman Catholic bishops of France, represented by the cardinal archbishop of Paris, in 1997 issued a formal statement about what had happened there. "We beseech the pardon of God, and ask the Jewish people to hear this word of repentance."
¹⁶

The bishops asked no more of Jews—not forgiveness or understanding—than that they hear. This was not a request or a new demand. The bishops were referring only to events of the war years, but the words represented a profound reversal of a century-old position. Their repentance was for the fact that, though the plight of Jews was well known to them at the time, the Church leaders of France, who had said nothing against the anti-Semites of the Dreyfus era, had said nothing again. There was, in the words of Pierre Pierrard, a "total silence of the Catholic hierarchy in the face of anti-Jewish legislation."
¹⁷
Indeed, with reference to the
Statut des Juifs,
the Vichy ambassador to the Vatican had reported back to Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain that "there is nothing in these measures that can give rise to criticism, from the viewpoint of the Holy See,"
¹⁸
an observation that was borne out as the Vichy government tightened the noose around the Jews. From the Catholic Church there was a near-total silence in 1940 and 1941, and even in 1942, as the open roundup of Jews proceeded.
¹⁹

But now, in 1997, they saw what they had done. The cardinal archbishop of Paris, Jean-Marie Lustiger, himself born a Jew and the son of a mother who died in Auschwitz, read the statement for the others. "Today," he said, speaking in French, "we confess that this silence was a faute" The word was mistranslated in some English-language press accounts as "transgression" or as "fault," but the word means "sin."

"This silence was a sin."

Of the Jews taken to Drancy, ten thousand were children. Upon her incarceration, Madeleine Dreyfus Lévy turned her attention to some of them. "I can be useful and help others through my
métier
as a social worker," she wrote in a message that was smuggled out to a friend. But soon enough, in November 1943, Madeleine was taken from Drancy to Auschwitz. Three months later, weighing less than seventy pounds, she died.
²⁰

Meanwhile, the Catholic nuns who protected Lucie did not know who she was. Because of them, the most famous Jewish woman in France survived until Liberation. Upon returning to Paris, Lucie and other family members embarked on a new campaign, one that recalled the family's effort fifty years before to learn the truth behind the lies told of Alfred Dreyfus. This time the family was trying to learn what had happened to Madeleine. In July 1945, Lucie, Madeleine's parents, and the others found out.

A few months later, on December 14, 1945, Lucie Hadamard Dreyfus, aged seventy-six, died in Paris, of heart disease and tuberculosis.
²¹
Her beloved granddaughter's body was never found, of course, but Madeleine's name and fate are carved into the headstone that Lucie shares with her husband in the Montparnasse Cemetery.
²²
The marker for Captain Dreyfus is an emblem of the links in this chain—a chain of coincidence but also of consequence: from Treves to "Dreifuss"; from Herschel Marx Levi, who was embarrassed by his name, to Madeleine Dreyfus Levy, who died for hers; from the Roman ghetto to the Paris Commune; from the True Cross to
La Croix.
Because of Lucie's large and faithful heart, the stone that remembers Alfred Dreyfus remembers Madeleine, and therefore bears forever the word "Auschwitz."

PART SEVEN