Before 2009, when the TV series "A French Village" ("Un village français") began, a mythology persisted among ordinary people that French citizens protected Jews during the German Occupation, according to scholar Daniel R. Schwarz. "Every family believed its ancestors belonged to the Resistance."
Not so, Schwarz argues. Rather, France deported 76,000-78,000 Jews, and under the Vichy government, "as the war progressed from 1940 to 1944, many of the same French people were collaborators, then bystanders, and finally Resistance members," said Schwarz, the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English Literature and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences. "After the war many people 'forgot' that they had been collaborators or bystanders and 'remembered' that they played an active role in the Resistance which they may have found attractive very late in the occupation."
"A French Village," which ran 72 episodes from 2009 to 2017, played a role in correcting the narrative, he said. It's one of many works he examines in "The Story in Fiction and Film of French Collaboration in the Occupation and Complicity in the Holocaust (1940-1944): German Occupation, Vichy, and Truth," which was published in July.
In the book, Schwarz shows how the dominant narrative of the occupation years imaginatively selected and arranged the presentation of neglected and suppressed facts. He guides the reader through films - fictional and documentary - and novels produced since the Occupation that have corrected the history from the "official" and erroneous one to an accurate depiction. The author of more than 20 books, Schwarz also published a book of poetry in September, "The Garden of My Saying," which speaks to Holocaust issues.
Read an interview with Schwarz about his new books on the College of Arts and Sciences website.
