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Nossiter does uncover enough expression of a lingering if subdued
anti-Semitism in Bordeaux and Vichy to help explain why there was no
public outcry against the roundup and deportation of the Jews. Both Bul–
garia and France, to their discredit, agreed to turn over to the Germans
foreign Jews living in unoccupied areas of their country. But only France,
with little official protest, surrendered native Jews too, using their own
police force to organize and execute the task. Yet virtually none of the
older residents of Vichy whom Nossiter interviewed could recall that the
former Hotel Algeria once housed the Bureau of Jewish Affairs, or that
such a n agency had even existed in the town. Although regional archives
give the details of the arrest and removal of Vichy Jews, from the peo–
ple's accounts one would have thought that it took place beneath a cloak
of invisibility. Nossiter controls his indignation at this scandal of forget–
fulness almost to the point of virtual neutrality, but the strategy acts as a
revelation to the engaged reader. For those familiar with Todorov's vol–
ume, a staggering question echoes from the pages of Nossiter's text: if a
confederate country like Bulgaria could denounce Nazi policy toward the
Jews from so many pockets of society, why could not equivalent traces
be found in a center of European culture like France?
The question becomes all the more perplexing, and its possible
answers more unsettling, when we examine the response of the citizens
of Tulle to the atrocity committed against their non-Jewish neighbors by
the Germans in June of 1944. The viciousness of the 55 action in this
rural community left the villagers with a permanently scarred memory
that resembles the lasting wound described by many survivors of the
Holocaust, though neither Nossiter nor the residents he interviews ever
hint at this connection. They speak of a "lack" (those who were mur–
dered or deported to their death) that is not an "emptiness" but a
painful "fullness," much as those Jews who outlived the camps describe
the absence of family members as a relentlessly afflicting presence. "As
I've grown older, over the years, I don't think a year passes when
I
am
not more appalled ... by the horror," says one woman of Tulle who was
two years old at the time of the hangings. Does her sentiment differ
from the words of the Jewish survivor at the Papon trial who said, "It's
a wound that doesn't heal, that can't heal"? Or does anguish have a self–
ish core that finds difficulty acknowledging the universal wound Ger–
man barbarism inflicted on its victims? The visible misery of the
townspeople of Tulle following the slaughter of their sons, husbands,
and fathers deserves nothing but our sympathy. Yet in the context of
ossiter's overall narrative, which includes his preceding accounts of
the indifference in Bordeaux and Vichy toward the fate of the Jews, the
