The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau

An estimated 200,000 Jewish people lived in Paris at the beginning of World War II, which began when Germany, led by Chancellor Adolf Hitler, invaded Poland. In June of 1940, the German Army invaded France. As described in the novel, thousands of people fled Paris for a time, though many, like the Marceaus, returned. French officials negotiated a surrender, which left part of France, including Paris, under the control of the German Nazi government, while the southern areas of France remained independent. These areas were collectively known as the Free Zone.

Nazi officials, aided by collaborators in the French Vichy government, set up labor camps like Drancy, which initially held criminals and prisoners of war. As in other areas under their control, the Nazi government compelled Jewish residents to identify themselves by wearing a yellow badge, the Star of David. Restrictions were increasingly placed on Jewish families and businesses, including prohibitions on relationships between Jewish and non-Jewish people. While many French people shared the antisemitic attitudes openly advanced by the Nazi party, few in the general population of occupied countries understood the program of genocide that the Nazis were coordinating.

Now known as the Vél d’Hiv roundup, the series of arrests made by French police on July 16-17, 1942, was the largest such undertaking in France during the war, and the first to target women and children along with men. The arrests included up to 13,000 people, 4,000 of whom were children. For days, 8,000 were interred in the sports arena called the Vélodrome d’Hiv, where they had limited access to food, water, or sanitation facilities. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, most of those held in the Vél d’Hiv were sent in stages to Drancy, after which they were sent to the death camps located further east. The majority died in Auschwitz, just as Tristan Berousek does (“The Vélodrome D’Hiver (Vél D’Hiv) Roundup.” Holocaust Encyclopedia.).

Harmel notes in the novel the historical reality that, throughout the war, around 76,000 Jewish people were deported from France. Less than 2,500 survived (146).