A 1940 Gaullist veteran of the Free French Forces (FFL), I was arrested
in October, 1943, and deported for 18 months to Buchenwald, then to the
hell of Dora, where thousands of French deportees lost their lives in the
underground factories of V1 and V2. I returned disabled.
This is to tell you that we shared with our Jewish comrades all the ordeals
of the camps. Having said that, I ask journalists with what right they
deny veteran deportees the right to question theories elevated to truth,
not by Jewish deportees but by some Zionists?
What kind of society do we live in, where we do not have the right to criticize,
in any manner, either Jews or Israelis or Zionists, without being automatically
accused of anti-semitism or racism?
Let journalists know one thing: The vast majority of deportees in Nazi
camps were not Jewish, even though the media give credence to the thesis
that only Jews were deported and exterminated.
Let them know, too, that in France, there were about 250,000 deportees,
of which about 25,000 were French Jews. Between 80,000 and 100,000 returned,
of which about 15,000 were Jews.
Nobody speaks about the non-Jewish deportees. Why? There is a lot of talk
about Shoah, but nothing about the underground factories of V1 and V2 in
Dora, where thousands of French deportees died of exhaustion and bad treatment.
Dora, too, was a camp of extermination, by work and by hunger.
As for Auschwitz, it is true that about 800,000 Jews from all of Europe
perished after 1943, but we must not forget that the first exterminated
deportees were 400,000 Soviet soldiers, about 150,000 gypsies, 500,000
to 600,000 Polish, and deportees of other nationalities.
There is no talk about this, either. So why talk only about Jews' sacrifices
and conceal the martyrdom of other deportees? They, too, have the right
to memory.
As a senior deportee, Garaudy is saying the same thing, when he maintains
that deportation of "non-Jews" was concealed and when he denounces
the manipulation of numbers, from the official talk initially of about
4 million Jews exterminated in Auschwitz, now reduced to 1 million.
Is it "revisionist" or "negationist" or even antisemitic
to maintain this?
In the camps, there was no monopoly by any category. We were all equal
in the face of suffering and death.
We cannot accept that deportation be monopolized by some and that journalists
who have known neither deportation nor war be permitted such manipulation.
Gaston Pernot,
Doctor of Law,
Commander of the Legion of Honor, Paris
("Le Figaro," Friday, May 3, 1996)