In 1992 during a visit to Paris, the city was preparing to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of liberation of Paris during World War II. It seemed to me that the story of the liberation from the French point of view was not completely accurate. I knew from first hand experience that the Americans liberated France and thus Paris as well. Also, as a Jew, I knew about the French complicity in rounding up Jewish families and sending them to concentration camps. As of 1992 the French had never admitted that they had any part in it. I remember a book that we had right after the war that shows the French gendarmes marching heroicly down the Champs Elisee on August 25, 1944 after Paris was liberated. The week before they had been rounding up Jews for deportation. The last train to the camps left August 24, 1944.
I decided I would do a set of murals celebrating the Liberation from a Jewish point of view. I wanted to have a show of the murals in the Salle des Fêtes in the Mairie of the 11th arrondisment where my family had lived. The 11th was a Jewish neighborhood that was emptied during the war. The show never happened, but I decided to do the murals anyway
There are seven murals because that’s the number that would have fit in the Salle des Fêtes. They represent what I thought were important events of the war for French Jews.
Philip Orenstein
The Battle of Britain, 1941
The British resistance to a Nazi invasion of their homeland made it possible for General De Gaulle and his Free French forces to continue to fight on after the Vichy government signed an armistice with the Germans. Cartoon-style images appear at random in each of the murals, as they would appear on a wall laden with graffiti in Paris in the 1970”s and 80’s because the murals represent Paris walls as a metaphor for his story. The artist gave careful attention to the image of the British R.A.F. Spitfire airplane, which was important to the Battle of Britain campaign. For the artist the Spitfire is the quintessential World War II airplane.