There Wasn't Anti-semitism In France.

O My Dear Parishioners, Let Us Endeavor To Get To Heaven! There We Shall See God. How Happy We Shall Feel! If The Parish Is Converted We Shall Go There In Procession With The Parish Priest At The Head. . . We Must Get To Heaven! What A Pity It Would Be If Some Of You Were To Find Yourselves On The Other Side!

Everyone Sees Drama From His Own Perspective. My Father Was Killed By A German Mine, While I Lost Other Relatives In Allied Bombing Attacks. The Second World War Claimed Tens Of Millions Of Victims. For Some The Most Terrible Aspect Of It Was The Deportations, While For Others It Was The Leveling Bombings Or The Mass Deaths By Starvation And Cold.

I Have Said, And I Repeat, At The Risk Of Appearing Sacrilegious, That The Gas Chambers Are A Detail Of The History Of The Second World War... If You Take A Book Of A Thousand Pages On The Second World War, In Which 50 Million People Died, The Concentration Camps Occupy Two Pages And The Gas Chambers Ten Or 15 Lines, And That's What's Called A Detail.

When You Write A Two Thousand Page History Of The Second World War, The Deportations And The Concentration Camps Will Take Up Five Pages, And The Gas Chambers Perhaps 20 Lines.

In France, At Least The German Occupation Was Not Especially Inhumane, Even If There Were A Number Of Excesses - Inevitable In A Country Of 550,000 Square Kilometres... If The Germans Had Carried Out Mass Executions Across The Country As The Received Wisdom Would Have It, Then There Wouldn't Have Been Any Need For Concentration Camps For Political Deportees.