To the Editor:
I've always felt that France has had an unfairly bad rap among Americans. Every time I've traveled to France my friends say they've heard that the French smell or that women there don't shave their armpits -- both statements are false, by the way. I have always defended France on these counts. I have even defended the French from accusations of anti-Semitism from fellow Jewish-Americans. However, after the Sept. 17 release of Maurice Papon, a noted French Nazi responsible for the deportation of over 1,600 Jews from southwestern France, I can't help but conclude that anti-Semitism still remains pervasive in France.
After studying abroad in France and seeing countless swastikas on building walls, signs on my university campus that said "Israel's days are numbered," and the ever-present "mort aux juifs -- death to Jews" written in many bathrooms, this recent development saddens, but does not surprise me. During the two and half months that I was in France, three synagogues were burned down and a Jewish school bus was blown up. Even in the face of this blatant hatred, I tried to convince myself that it wasn't France as a whole, but a few extremists that exhibited such extreme anti-Semitism. Yet the response of the French government was near apathetic, with only a slight increase in the number of police patrolling Jewish residential and worship areas.
Now, France has released one of its most notorious Nazi criminals because he is ill. Papon spent most of his post-Nazi life living comfortably and occupying high positions in the French government. It was only in 1998 -- at the age of 88 -- that his past finally began catching up to him and the French government sentenced him to a mere 10 years in prison. And now, he's feeling sick, and they release him. If only Papon and the other Nazis had been so sympathetic to the Jews in the 1940s.
It was a travesty of justice that his sentence was only 10 years to begin with, and to think that this murderer will once again live comfortably after serving less than four years in a minimum security prison makes me ill. My heart aches for the Jews of Bordeaux, whose families were knowingly sent to their deaths in one of Papon's deportations to Auschwitz. My heart aches for the Jewish community of France, the largest Jewish community in Western Europe, whose voices of protest and sadness have gone unheard, both in 1998 at Papon's "sentencing," and now at his release.
How, in light of this recent injustice, the aforementioned anti-Semitic violence, and the success of neo-Nazi Jean-Marie Le Pen in French politics, can anyone consider France a country comfortable for Jews? This is not the France of "libert, egalit, fraternit" that I have come to love.
