After the Deportation Memory Battles in Postwar France

"An estimated 160,000 persons were deported from France to camps in Central and Eastern Europe during the Second World War. 76,000 of these were Jews. Of the rest, a rough half, 41,000 or so, were résistants. The Jews did not survive the ordeal: a mere 2,500 returned. Résistants and others fared better-47,500 came back-, but the toll was still a terrible one. The figures are an eloquent reminder, if one is needed, of the lethalness of the German camp system. Non-racial deportees had a somewhat better than fifty-fifty chance of coming out alive. For a Jew, transport to the East amounted to a death sentence. Embedded in the numbers is also an assumption: that the story of the Deportation, as the French call it, was double. Résistants and Jews alike were herded onto trains and shipped eastward, but the fate that awaited them was not the same, and a vocabulary has been invented to characterize the difference. David Rousset was arrested for Resistance activities in 1943 and packed off to a series of camps, Neuengamme and Buchenwald the most infamous among them. He had an insider's knowledge of the Nazi carceral archipelago and lived to write about it, publishing L'Univers concentrationnaire in 1946. The text was one of the first of its kind, an analysis of the camp phenomenon understood as an alternate reality, a system with an infernal logic all its own. The term caught on and, translated as concentrationary universe, has even migrated into English. Jews do make an appearance in Rousset's oeuvre, but they are marginal to the story he has to tell" --