An antisemite’s Damascene conversion, March 1943
Daniel Cordier, secretary to General de Gaulle’s representative in Occupied France, came face-to-face with his youthful antisemitic views on seeing an elderly Jew in Paris, in March 1943. The experience shook him to the core. For the rest of his life (he died in November 2020), he sought to live down the shame of the prejudices he had imbibed from his family and the pre-war French far-right.
The atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on 7 October 2023 sparked fleeting expressions of sympathy in parts of the world, but also outpourings of hatred against Israel and Jews more generally. It was soon apparent that anti-Zionism was all too often the sugar-coating designed to render antisemitism palatable. A corner of a carpet had been lifted, revealing a seething stew of resentment and loathing among wide swathes of western society.
In March 1943, Daniel Cordier, till then an unrepentant antisemite, like many from his background, came face to face with the reality of the Nazis’ and Vichy’s persecution of the Jews. He recoiled in horror at the implications of what he saw: an elderly man with a yellow star on his overcoat, accompanying a small boy.
I’d like to think that, like Daniel Cordier, many of those today screaming their hatred for Israel, and in too many cases for Jews in general, will soon realize their “abject wickedness”.
[…] As I neared the café, I saw coming towards me, huddled together, an old man with a young child. Their overcoats bore the yellow star. I had never seen one: there were none in the southern zone. What I had read in England or in France about its origins and how the Nazis were exploiting it had taught me nothing of the hurt I felt at that moment: the shock of this vision plunged me in an unbearable sense of shame.
And so, the attacks on the Jews I had taken part in before the war had led to this degrading spectacle of human beings marked like cattle, picked out for the crowd’s contempt. Suddenly, I felt utter disgust at my blind fanaticism.
I had never seen the link between my wild adolescent harangues—’Shoot Blum in the back’—and the reality of murder. At that instant I grasped that these slogans could kill. What madness had blinded me to the extent that reading about this for the past two years had fail to awaken in me the least suspicion nor, I must confess, the slightest interest in the crime to which I was an accomplice?
A crazy thought raced through my mind: to go and embrace this old man drawing near and beg his forgiveness. I felt crushed beneath the burden of my past: what could I do to wipe clean the abject wickedness to which I had been an accomplice, as I abruptly became aware?
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