Bøger af Anne Sinclair

I år er det 80 år siden, at forløberen til et af de mørkeste kapitler i Frankrigs historie fandt sted. I 1942 samlede nazisterne, med hjælp fra fransk politi, op mod 15.000 jøder på en gammel cykelbane, Vel d'Hiv, for senere at deportere dem til den visse død i udryddelseslejrene øst på.I slutningen af 1941 besluttede den franske stat i samarbejde med nazisterne at starte pågribelsen af de franske jøder ved at samle knap 1000 jødiske intellektuelle, kunstnere, advokater og andre notabiliteter i en lejr i Compiègne. La rafle des notables. I dag næsten glemt.Anne Sinclairs bedstefar var en af notabiliteterne og hun genfortæller gribende hans historie i den større ramme. Sinclair er en kendt fransk journalist og forfatter og tidligere gift med Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

"This story has haunted me since I was a child," begins Anne Sinclair in a personal journey to find answers about her own life and about her grandfather's, Léonce Schwartz. What her tribute reveals is part memoir, part historical documentation of a lesser known chapter of the Holocaust: the Nazi's mass arrest, in French the word for this is rafle and there is no equivalent in English that captures the horror, on December 12, 1941 of influential Jews-the doctors, professors, artists and others at the upper levels of French society-who were then imprisoned just fifty miles from Paris in the Compiègne-Royallieu concentration camp. Those who did not perish there, were taken by the infamous one-way trains to Auschwitz; except for the few to escape that fate. Léonce Schwartz was among them.