Ideas - Who's the hero when the choice is impossible?

Episode Date: June 9, 2026

Rachel Jedinak will never forget the day that changed her life in July 16, 1942. She was eight years old, living in Nazi-occupied France at a time known as les années noires — The Dark Years. Police rounded up Jewish men, women, and children for deportation. Rachel, her older sister and mother were among them. That morning two police offers did something that Rachel considers an act of resistance. The girls were saved. But their mother was not. IDEAS contributor Neil Sandell, based in Nice, France, explores the complicated moral territory of resistance, what it actually meant during the occupation, and maybe means now.

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This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. Into the elevator. We go directly to the exhibition, so we don't lose any time. Great. The resistance. and deportation history center in the French city of Lyon.

This is good because the museum only opens at 10 a.m., so we are alone here. Say that again? This actually is, the museum only begins at, starts open its door at 10. So we're here. So we're here alone. So it's good, we can talk. So this actually is the beginning of the exhibition. All this first part is about the history of the building.

We are now in. It's a beautiful old building with stone walls but restored. Do you know what happened here during the war? No. So here it was the headquarters of the Gestapo of Lyon. In this building. Yes, exactly. It's a museum, but it's also a place of remembrance,

if we can say it like that. France, under German occupation. French, a call to Mr. President of the Republic, I assume,

at from today, the direction of the government of the France. Here's a new of very

important. We'll want to the first community. 1940 to 1944, a period

the French called Les Ané Noir, the dark years, a period that tore the fabric of

French society apart. People faced difficult, sometimes impossible choices. Some collaborated, some resisted. Most stood on the sidelines, just trying to survive. It's what one historian,

Philippe Bourin, called the grey moral texture of the times. Ideas contributor, Neil Sandell, is based in Nice, France. Here's his documentary, The Dark Years. We felt the anguoise, There's this video that has stayed with me.

Michelle Jedanak, talking about the day that changed her life. July 16, 1942. She's eight years old. That morning, police fan out across Paris. In the next two days, they will round up 13,000 Jewish men, women, and children for deportation. Among them, Rachel, her older sister and their mother. Their first stop is a holding center. Hundreds are already crowded inside.

Her mother tells the girls, get out through the fire exit. Rachel's older sister takes her hand and they walk to the door. But there are two policemen on guard in front of it. They see the girls and look away. The girls slip out the door and are out onto the street. The two policiers who have simply turned the

head, I call it a act of resistance. The two police officers who simply turned their heads I consider it an act of resistance. This clip broke me. An old woman reliving

the worst day of her life an act of resistance that saved two children. For me, it was a moment of stunning clarity. The refrain, I was only following orders, laid bare as a pathetic excuse. And yet so much was not clear. Those two policemen, they were also participants in a monstrous machine, a genocide. Why not let Rachel's mother go, too, instead of sending her off to die? What moral territory are we in here? It's hard not to judge, and it's impossible not to ask, what would I have done during the dark years?

I don't pretend I would have been a hero. We need, I need, to understand what life was like in France, to understand the choices people made then, and what resistance actually meant during the occupation, and maybe means now. So where to begin? Well, I think that you have to start the story, on May the 10th, 1940, when Germany first turned westwards and invaded the Netherlands and Belgium

before crossing into France. Halk-Kohynski, author of Resistance, The Underground War in Europe. That triggered off a huge flood of Belgian refugees. So the first thing the French knew about the war were these desperate Belgian refugees trekking through northern France towards Paris. And very quickly the French army was in retreat. Eight million Belgians and French were on the roads trying to evade the Germans, heading south.

June 11, 1940. Drew Tartier from her memoir, the house near Paris. As we passed the Gar-Mamparnasse, I noticed that as far as the eye could see, The streets around the station were one mass of people with their belongings, trying to get on trains going anywhere out of Paris. The day was stifling, and there was panic, misery, and anxiety where everyone looked. On the road out of the city, people were pushing baby carriages or pulling small carts.

Others were on loaded bicycles, and some were walking, carrying their children in their valises. Some were moving their families and possessions and wagons drawn by oxen. Farther on, we saw dead bodies on the side of the road. French men, women and children who had been machine-gunned by German stucas. Cars were lying in ditches overturned, and men and women stood near them, weeping. Six days later, Marichelle Pettin, the new leader of France, calling for a seat's fire. At 1.30, we listen to the news on the wireless.

Denise Dominac, a 15-year-old from Lyon and soon a member of the resistance, writing in her diary. We hear a speech by Marichael Pettin saying that France invaded and defeated had asked the enemy for an armistice? Grandpa stormed out of the dining room like a madman, and from a distance, we heard his sobs. All of us started crying when we heard this death warrant for France. And we couldn't swallow a single bite of the meal. You have separation of families.

Many people have fled, and you don't know what has happened to them. The Swiss historian. Philippe Purenne. You must rely on a postal service that took weeks and months to work again. You have to rely from word to mouth information and rumors. So it's a moment of great confusion. The terms of the armistice are brutal. Germany plunders the French treasury and carves up its territory.

Historian Halleck Koheinsky. France was now cut in two with a demarcation line splitting the occupied north from the unoccupied south. So it was very traumatic. Not everyone could go home because you weren't allowed to go back to certain departments. And you were missing men who'd been taken prisoner of war. It led to enormous dislocation of the populations. Germany holds captive almost 2 million French soldiers. Paris empties out its population shrinking from 3 million to 1 million,

and the Germans impose their presence in the smallest details of everyday life. Even the time of day. That summer in France, clocks are set one hour later to Berlin time. And there was more. The whole appearance of Paris and all major towns changed. because of the Germans and the swastika banners. And the Germans had also altered the exchange rate, so they could buy up all the luxuries in the shops and all the best food.

So the French would encounter the Germans in the towns, but not necessarily in the countryside. There was a split between that. And of course in the south, they didn't see the Germans. And so during the war, there were really, until no... November 1942, there were two Francis. There was the occupied zone and the unoccupied zone. And people reacted differently as a result. The new French government sets up in the spa town of Vichy, Marshal Pettin, France's hero of the First World War, rules by decree.

And he launches what he calls the National Revolution. It's a return to, traditional values, church, hard work, family. Vichy blames France's defeat on moral decline, and it goes after old political enemies and stages a show trial. It also scapegoats' Jews, banning them from public life, depriving them of their livelihoods, seizing their homes and belongings. They are made to be outcasts. You know, the Vichy regime, like any other collaborating government,

or administration, presented itself as the shield. They promised to protect the population against the worst of German demands. As it turns out, and the historical record shows this, Germany did not instigate the persecution of France's Jews. It came from Vichy, right from its earliest days. There was no more liberty. Liberty was over. The novelist Xavier Donzelli.

Liberty was not for everybody. There was no equality because some French were not considered French anymore, just like the Jews, for example. And there were no fraternity, no brotherhood, because people were in two divided camps about how France should go on after the terrible defeat of 1940. Everything was changed. And the guy who incarnated France at that time, Maraisal Pettin,

he betrayed everyone. He betrayed everyone because people thought that with him in power, France would go back fighting the Germans. And then they thought that he would protect them. But he didn't protect anybody. Certainly not from hunger. By October 1940, bread, meat, butter, virtually every staple of the French diet was hard to find.

To cope, Vichy created an elaborate system of rationing. My guide at the Resistance Museum in Lyon, Charlotte de Guy, walked me through it. Charlotte, what are we looking at right now? So right now we are looking at food rationing tickets and food rationing cards. It's a bit like an ID for food.

So you can see the name of the person, their job, their nationality, their birth date, where do they live, etc. So you have the ID card.

And in the ID cards, you have then coupons. Here, for example, you can read viande cheval, so it means horse meat and a family was allowed to go to the city hall or to the town hall to get these tickets only once a month. The thing is, people were lining up. How long did people line up? For a very long time, sometimes many hours and the worst situation that could happen was to line up and then you arrive at the shop and then there isn't food anymore?

Who is this woman on the video? So this woman is Andre Gayar. She was four years old in 1940. And in this video, she explains what she remembers of this time, and especially of the rationing system. The main memory that she keeps from the war is that people were hungry. all the time. People were hungry.

Yeah. I've led such a good life. I've never been really hungry. Me neither. Me neither. But the prospect... She says that the hunger was waking them at night. Yeah. It's hunger without ever thinking that there's going to be an end in sight. Exactly. And also, It's hunger, and when you eat, it's not good things that you eat.

In France, the hunger sharpened the divisions between haves and have-nots. If you had money or valuables you could sell, you could buy on the black market. But what if you couldn't? What if you were desperate? To what lengths would you go to feed your children? Would you steal? Would you turn informer? Would you become a sex worker?

All of those things happened. And as the years of occupation wore on, the rations became smaller. Early on, the Germans inoccupied France set out to influence public opinion, French historian Olivier V Viorca. Some Germans wanted to seduce the French elites by organizing receptions, organizing dinners, you see, this kind of stuff, but also by bribing journalists, by giving a lot of money, to friendly newspapers to explain that collaboration was the best way for France to survive

in the new German order. The seduction of the elites, as if these intellectuals, these celebrities, these captains of industry were helplessly naive, powerless to resist. No, they made a choice. In the early days of the occupation, German soldiers take pains to be courteous. but this charm offensive is doomed to failure. The Germans punish the slightest resistance. From Jean-Gaiano's Diary of the Dark Years. December 8, 1941.

From now on until further notice, we can no longer go out between 5 p.m. and 5 a.m. The metro will stop running at 5.30. The restaurants will close. It is 6.30. I watched nightfall, not a sound, not a whisper. This is Paris. For the duration of the curfew, windows must be closed, the authorities have ordered.

Behind the window panes, the people in the house facing mine are looking, as I am, at the empty street. We wave to each other. Prison solidarity. But suddenly, in an inner courtyard toward the end of the street, The sound of a loud bugle call. A cocky Parisian kid is thumbing his nose at our servitude. The early resistance was often based on just anger and indignation. And it was very small-scale stuff,

a matter of cutting telephone wires, putting sugar into the petrol tanks of German vehicles. It was minor stuff. You write about the resistance. in part as being a battle for hearts and minds. What do you mean by that? Well, hearts and minds were the battle to convince people that they may have lost the battle, but they hadn't lost the war and that they should still hope for a better future. That was one bit. Another bit was how to behave towards the occupiers,

how to keep your distance from them and not accept. that you were supposed to be subservient to them. Then the Klandersstein press also existed to show that there were other people, you weren't alone in thinking, I don't like this current situation. Even before the movements began to be developed, it was just a matter of you pass on something that you have found somewhere onto a friend who copies it out and passes it onto trusted friends. It gave a sense of togetherness.

And above all, the importance of the press was it told the truth, because the Germans blamed the shortages of food in France on the British blockade. But in fact, as the Underground's press pointed out, it was caused by the Germans seizing all the agricultural produce and most of the industrial produce too. Here, London. What was Radio Laundra? Radio Laundra was an offshoot of the BBC.

It was the BBC's French service. The French speak to the French program that ran every evening. And so it was a way of Degaule establishing himself as the Free French leader. It was a way of the... French who were still living in liberty in London to say, we are thinking of you. What impact did it have, do you think? Oh, I think that the BBC as a whole had an enormous impact. I mean, the Germans knew that because they would discover things like electrical usage

would go up at the time when the BBC was broadcasting, the streets would be cleared. At one time, when DeGaul was going to make an important announcement, the Germans decided to offer double potatoes then, in order to see who would listen to the radio and who would go and get the potatoes. If there was a soundtrack to the resistance, it might be this. Every BBC broadcast to Occupied Europe began with... Those are the first notes of Beethoven's fifth semifference. which also happened to be the Morse for the letter V.

And the V for Victory campaign was enormously successful across Europe, even in countries where the letter V had no meaning at all. Because it was a very simple thing you could do just with a piece of chalk and a brick wall, you could quickly scribble the letter V. And that let everyone else know. Well, there's someone else on my side too. if I'm not happy with the situation. It annoyed the Germans enormously.

So I'm just going to take one last level. I think I've got this one. Okay. I'll just put that around there. Obviously you speak German. Yes. So help me out with this phrase, Nacht in Nibel? Oh, Nacht to Nebel.

Yes. My name is Tim Reiback. My most recent book is Take Over Hitler's Final Rise to Power. This is basically the story of the suicide of a democracy. Again. Nacht unnebel. It means literally. It literally means, Nacht unnebel means night and fog.

And it relates to what was called the Nognebel. which was a decree issued by Hitler himself, and it was instituted specifically to avoid the judicial systems that were in place. The countries around Germany were occupied by the Wehrmacht, by the German military. The German military had its own court system, so that if there were resistance fighters, and they were caught. They would be placed before a German military court. But Hitler wanted to forego that system

and instituted his own process, this Nachtunebel elast, this night and fog decree, as it were, which simply had people disappear. Disappear. What does disappear mean? Yeah, well, disappeared was to black holes in any system of accountability. There was a knock at your door in the middle of the night,

and you disappeared in the night and fog. You would simply vanish into the black hole of the Gestapo, in which there was no accountability, there was no traceability. Somebody simply vanished. the family had no idea where they were. There was no recourse. There was nothing because you had no idea where they were. You had no idea whether they were alive or dead.

Jean-Paul Sartre. There was no one in Paris who didn't have a family member or a friend who had not been arrested, deported, or executed. It seemed as if there were hidden holes in the city and as if it were emptying itself through these halls, as if seized by an internal and undetectable hemorrhage. Witnesses would remember the sounds of people being taken out of their homes, whether they were screams or simply expulsions from their residents,

of people being dragged out and taken away. Trust would be a gauzy tissue. in this kind of society? Yeah, I mean, Bertolt Brecht, the great German playwright, wrote little vignettes about this where suddenly parents could not even trust their children. They didn't know what the children were taking back to the schools or what the teachers were asking the children about what was being said at home

and whether things were innocent or not when you get to that point of intrusion into the lives of people, you have destroyed the tissue that holds a community or society or even a family together. The vocal ensemble, Contus, based in Minneapolis, performing a cantata composed by Francis Boulinque during the Second World War. The lyrics are by the poet Paul Elouard, one of his songs. poems actually became the anthem of the resistance. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Let's see if Toronto advisors know their life insurance providers, who offers whole life insurance

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In the movie Casablanca, one of the most stirring moments comes when the patrons of Rick's Cafe rise up and sing the Marseillaise. Hollywood, of course. But it actually captures the battle for hearts and minds in a nutshell. Anything to rally the spirit of resistance. In the real-life battle for hearts and minds, a poem did that. Liberté became legendary. Ideas contributor, Neil Sandel. About a year ago, there was a sublime moment on French television. It happened on a program about books, La Grande Librarie in France television. The host, Augustin Trappenard,

had just asked his guest, What is courage? Vainque her fear? It's a thing personal. But one of one is a nation collective or other than others that are even risk their life like me. The speaker is Edgar Morin,

a member of the French resistance. At that, The courage comes all and it can't the moment of the

gist of what he says is this overcoming one's fear is a personal

thing but once you're part of a collective nation risking your life

where there's a kind of brotherhood at that moment courage comes naturally it doesn't

prevent moments of fear but courage is inherent in the very act of resistance

but the courage is Edgar Morin, sociologist, intellectual, 103 years old. I've been known to be bonner

in a moment of grand malheur. At the end of the interview, the camera cuts to a close-up of a 12-year-old girl. She's introduced as the recent winner of a national elocution competition.

Her name is Joanne Samalin Lagardeer. On my cailliers On my pupitre and the Arbres On the sand, on the

ice I've cried Your name Edgar Morin's eyes light up The poem is Liberté by Paul Elouard At that moment

The poem becomes a bridge Between the past and present Between an old man and a girl On every page read On every page read

On all the page on all the blank pages. Pierre, sand, sand, stone, blood, paper or ash. I write your name. Eluard was some kind of a privileged guy. Zavey Donzelli, a French journalist. He wrote a novel about the poem called He Parle Le Pouvre d'Amon.

He was famous. He could have escaped when the thing turned bad, just like many of his friends did. just like Dali, Salvador Dali did. But he came back to Paris, and Paris was occupied by the German. And his world poetry changed. Before the war, he was the poet of surrealism. He used to write for those who liked poetry, but he did not write for the common people.

During the winter of 1940, 1941, his poetry changed totally. And he started to write about... the common feelings. It was a poetry very close to what people felt about the suffering of his country, about the suffering of himself. And his poem Liberté comes from that. I mean, it's not obvious. But the beautiful thing about his poem Liberté is that it was not a poem that was thought as a war poem. It was a love poem. El U.S. said just before it, he said that he wrote this poem for his wife, Noosh. Noosh.

Tell me about her. Noosh. Inspiration. Softness. Elegance. Green eyes. Brown air. Actress.

News. Happiness. Happiness. freedom, model. He said that he realized that the love he had, the love he fell for his wife, was enormous, gorgeous, but it was not worth loving somebody

if you had not liberty, if you had not freedom. On each bouffet of auror, on the mare, on the baton, on the mountain, d'emante, I've cried your name. On every breath, of dawn, on the sea, on the boats, on the demented mountain tops, I write your name. On the mousse of the nuage, on the

pure ephes and fad, I'll write your name. On the foam of the clouds, on the sweat of the storm, on the dense and dull rain, I write your name. Poetry is an act of resistance. It's a very simple poem. simple poem. It's a very repetitive poem. It's always the same organization in the poem, three verse and then some kind of refrain, as we say in French, I write your name, I write your name. It's like this is one of the lesson of the poem. On every single thing you can write this name.

even on chains you can write Liberty on a cloud nobody can catch a cloud nobody can capture a cloud if you capture a cloud the cloud disappears you can't get him it's like gas so even on this

impossible thing to catch you can still write the name of at the end of the poem when he says And by the power of a word, I recommence my life. I'm born to know you. For to know me. Liberty.

Liberty. Can you give us a rough translation of that? And by the power of a word, I start my life again. I was born to know you, to name you, to name you. liberty. How do people start to find it? Because at one level, it's underground, on the other level, it's being printed in collections of poetry. That's the funny thing about poetry during the war. You know, poetry in itself brings a hidden message. This is the nature of poetry. So many writers use poetry to convey a message. And poetry during the war flourished. Many, many,

books of poetry were printed and sold. Because I guess it remained pure. I mean, cinema, theater, and many reviews and books were completely contaminated by the dark ideas of the Nazi Germany. So poetry remained, really. Remain pure. It was a different part of life that no one could invade and violate. In 1943, the poem makes its way to England. In London, there's a huge French community. And they read this and they say, wow, this is very good. We have to support them.

And they reprint it in a French review in London. And from there, phew. The is all about what comes next. The Royal Air Force, the Royal Air Force, parachutes the poem over occupied France. Or so the story goes. Xavier Donzelli traveled to London and the National Archives. I went through papers of French propaganda

printed by the British to be airdropped in France. and in the huge amount of paper I went through, I saw a copy of the printing bill for the review, saying how many copies of the book were printed and even the price for the string to put the little booklets together, to keep them together. So I had a very sure proof that it had been printed in England And from there, I fold a white rabbit.

Down the hole. And just to be clear, the poem was part of a series of booklets that had other poems, speeches, and this was in, I think, the fourth of these reviews. Exactly. They used planes, just like they were bombing the country. But no, they were not bomb. bombing anyone. They were just bombing people with literature, words and poems. In May and June, 1943, Allied bombers pound targets deep inside Germany.

But at the same time, the RAF is dropping Paul Elouard's poem over France. On June 11th, just before midnight, 23 Wellington bombers take off from RAF Hickston. They're bound for targets in Normandy. The crew of BK 559 is made up of one Australian, four British aviators, and a Canadian from Pembroke, Ontario, Sergeant Delmar Murray Davis, age 22. He's the navigator. R.A.F. Hickston is a training unit. It is the crew's first mission.

This guy were dropped into a huge ocean of uncertainty. They were so young, most of them were not experienced, and they got lost. And they run out of fuel. And finally they crashed in France. Three of them were captured by the Germans. One escaped. The pilot died. And one had a very, very confused trajectory afterwards.

This was Sergeant Davis. After the war, the crash investigation turns up conflicting reports about how he died and even where. He was a mechanic and he became a navigator. He was not at the right place. He should have remained in England to repair, to fix the aircraft. But now he was put in this plane and he was supposed to guide the aircraft. And it was not his place. So there's a tragedy about him.

This Canadian guy. This Canadian guy. Four of the airmen parachute to safety. The only one to escape capture is Sergeant Bernard Reeves. He comes down in the countryside just before dawn, wanders until he comes across a cottage. He sees a woman, gestures that he's thirsty, and she offers him some water.

And then, well, let's... We use the frame just for a second, because what unfolds next is one family's moment of truth. What do you do with an airman who's been found in your house? There's no nothing you can do. You are caught. The airmen will end up in a POW camp. You will get deported to one of the harshest work camps in Germany. The family feeds Sergeant Reeves, gives him civilian clothing to wear.

The father goes out. and finds his parachute and buries it. And for the next four months, they hide him. Keep him safe until they can hand him over to a resistance escape line. The people in the resistance were ordinary people. They weren't supermen and superwomen. They were ordinary people. And they did extraordinary things in a very challenging environment.

And so I think you can't say that the resistance is formed of nature's natural rebels, because they tend to be far too reckless. It is the quiet person who you pass into the street without recognizing who could be leading a network, who could be the courier carrying a vital message. You just don't know who these people are. They're operating in the shadows. The resistance guides Sergeant Reeves south through France and into Spain. From there, he makes it to Gibraltar and then home.

That's how we know his story. By the end of the war, the French resistance has helped roughly 4,000 downed airmen get back to England. Charlotte, what are we looking at right now? So right now we are looking at an ID card from a woman named Denise Goldstein. This ID card has the specificity that it's written Jif, so Jews in big red letters on it. It has been stamped. How did anyone know that she was Jewish? So there was

a law during the Vichy regime. It was in June 1941 and it made the census obligatory for Jewish people. So how did people knew that she was Jewish? Probably because

she went to the city hall and told them that she was Jewish. And with this law, it enabled the fiss regime to draw up some lists with the name of Jewish people. Lists of Jewish people. There are a few aspects of wartime France more troubling than the persecution of the Jews. A few bishops in Protestant clergy tried to intercede. The town of Chambon-sur-Lignan famously becomes a safe haven.

But did the organized resistance mobilized to save Jews? No, says French. historian and author Olivier V Viorca. Resisters did not react, and the Free French did not either. You had not a mobilization of this organized resistance to save the Jews. Because you had many, many reasons, but they did not perceive what was the reality of the extermination. They thought that the best way to react again extermination was to win.

the war. Some people were also anti-semitic. So you see, you have many reasons which explains that. So it was a reaction which was individual taken by ordinary French who tried to do what they could to help the Jews to escape and to survive. The tipping point comes in 1942 with the mass roundups of Jews who live in France, men, women, and children round. it up in broad daylight, there's not even a pretense of secrecy. Underground networks spring up to at least save the children. In Nice, for example, a young Jewish couple create what becomes known as the Marcell network.

They are Musa Abadi and Odette Rosenstock. It begins one day when Musa Abadi is out walking, and he sees a crowd. There's a woman lying on the ground, covered in blood. and a French policeman is stomping on her head with his boot and her young son is standing next to her screaming, Mama, Mama, Mama. And there's a crowd of about 20 people standing around watching doing nothing. And Musa says what's happening?

And a man in the crowd says, Can't you see? He's disciplining a Jew. And Musa is really shocked by this, and he walks away yelling out loud, God, how could you have abandoned us? And he says afterwards that he could never forget that little boy. And that was the first time he understood that he had to do something to protect the children. Fred Coleman, author of the Marcel Network. Musa is hoping to hide children in Catholic convents and boarding schools.

A body sets up a meeting with Paul Raymond, the bishop of Nice. Paul Raymond was really an extraordinary man, for one thing, very rarely for a Catholic bishop in France in those years. He was speaking out from his pulpit denouncing the persecution of the Jews. so he really wanted to cooperate. Not only did he agree to help place these children in the schools and convents, but he agreed to provide an office for Musa in his residence. Musa had no office. So now Musa has an office in the residence of the bishop.

And not only that, but what are they going to do in this office? They're going to falsify papers so that they can change the identity of Jewish Jews. children and hide them under Catholic names. So here is the bishop agreeing to use his own private residence for the falsification of documents. They forged documents because it's not simply a matter of hiding children. They need a cover story. And then it has to be drilled into them. Musa said this whole process, which he called depersonalization, was not fun. He said it was awful, odious day after day, but that's what they have to do. So the abates build a secret network.

There's a finance guy, a Protestant minister from Nice, a bureaucrat who gives them blank food ration cards, small town mayors, and countless families who offer shelter. Everyone is taking a personal risk. They make a choice to do something, and that something is big. So this turns out to be a really ecumenical operation. We have Catholic, Protestants, and Jews all cooperating together to save children's lives. Extraordinary. All told, the Marcel Network saves 527 children.

At the same time, many of the children emerged from the war scarred by what they've gone through. They've lost their parents in the most traumatic way you can imagine. Their story is not happily ever after. The reckoning of what happened during the dark years has never really ended. Its history has been written and rewritten, contested every step of the way. And every so often, a new voice breaks through from the past.

I'm thinking of the manuscripts written during the war that lay dormant for so many years, like Elin Bair's journal, published in 2008. She begins her diary when she's 21. She lives in Paris. She's Jewish. The year is 1942.

Monday, June 8th. This is the first day I feel I'm really on holiday. The weather is glorious. Yesterday's storm has brought fresher air. The birds are twittering. It's a morning as in Paul Valerie. It's also the first day I'm going to to wear the yellow star. Those are the two sides of how life is now. Youth, beauty, and freshness,

all contained in this limpid morning, barbarity and evil represented by this yellow star. From the Journal of Elen Bear, she goes on to describe what it feels like to be stared at, the snide comments and slurs, the words of support, and the exhaustion that overhauled realms her just from keeping her dignity intact. My God, I never thought it would be so hard, she writes that evening. Ellen Bear is a graduate of literature at the Sorbonne. She's cultured, plays violin. She comes from a well-to-do family,

so the journal is a window into that social milieu, but it's also a chronicle of the noose that tightens around the Jewish community in Paris. Her father, Raymond Bear, is the man. managing director of an industrial chemical company, a man of some social standing, and in June 1942, police detain him for not displaying his yellow star correctly. Eventually, the authorities offer a deal. We'll let you go if you exile yourself to the so-called free zone. It's a choice, but only if you pretend that he's not being held hostage. What they are trying to make us do is an act of abominable cowardice.

What else could you expect from the Germans? They're swapping Papa for what we value most. Our pride, our dignity, our sense of resistance, not cowardice. Other people think we enjoy being cowards. Enjoy. Could God. Deep down, they'll be glad not to have to admire and respect us any longer. It's a good deal for the Germans, too.

Keeping Papa in prison makes too many people indignant. It's bad publicity for them. In their view, releasing Papa and allowing him to resume his career would be dangerous. But having Papa vanish into the free zone, and the whole business go quiet, go flat, that's ideal. They don't want heroes. They want to make their victims dispel. not arouse admiration for them. But if that's the way it is, I vow to carry on being as much of a thorn in their side as I can be.

A thorn in their side. In other words, resistance. But at what cost? Three months after his arrest, Nelan's father is set free. His company has paid a ransom. but in March 1944 police round up Elin Bear and her parents they deport them to Auschwitz the three are murdered in the camps

it is so hard not to second guess you wish they had seen it coming it was just as impossible for Elen Bear to know what Auschwitz meant as it is impossible for us not to know David Bellows who translated the diary into English. We should resist the temptation of wishing that the young woman had understood

sooner and drawn the conclusions that we think we would have reached in time. Smugness is not a useful reaction to this searing work. Rather, we should pause and ask, are we sure we know what is going on before our eyes? Are we sure we know what's going on before our eyes? Are we sure we know what's going on before our eyes. I started out wondering, what would I have done back then? But it seems to me there's a better question. What can I do now? On ideas, you were listening to a documentary called The Dark Years by contributor Neil Sandell, who's based in Nice, France. Re readings by Ian Brown, Leah Kelly, and Melanie Schnell. Special thanks to Custle. Special thanks to Cistair. Silly Felle, Sylvie Delobel, Magali Le Frank and the CHRD in Lyon,

Mariette Job, Rachel Jedinac, the Choa Memorial in Paris, David Bellows and McElhoes Press, Rosebud Productions, Adrian Van Denhoeven, Oxford Publishing and PLS Clear for Diary of the Dark Years by Jean Gayeno. Music by Contus and under Creative Commons license, Sergei Cheramizanov, Daniel Birch, David Hillowitz, Jake Hunter, Listening Spot, and Loboloco. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for ideas, technical production, Emily Carvezio and Danielle Duval.

The senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, And I'm Nala Ayyed.