If you feel like a Jew in Paris in ’39 after Hitler had just smashed the last resistance in Warsaw, you might sit back and think how lucky you are to be a Jew in France instead. If Hitler should be stupid enough to wheel and turn on France there is first the impenetrable Maginot Line…and of course, le Grande Armee of ze Republic. So enjoy the eight-month sitzkreig. If there is any real danger the British will come save us. Again.
80 years later, six million dead, the surviving Jews who return to Paris take nothing for granted.
About some classes of people and some ideologies…always assume the worst.
(Photo credit: a satire-poster of Comrade Lenin to appear to be giving a Heil Hitler salute, from the 1990’s newly-freed East European states, a definite Charlie Hebdo touch.)
