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
De Gaulle and Petain
During the occupation France was split between the French who accepted the armistice and followed Marshall Petain’s collaboration with the Nazis, and those who vowed to fight on and follow General De Gaulle’s Free French forces fighting with the Allies. The two men face in opposite directions as in the ancient Janus figure, Petain facing right and De Gaulle left. In front of each are copies of contemporary political posters. Petain faces a train of the French National railroad, the SNCF, which was used to transport French workers to Germany, as the posters encourage, and French Jewish families to Auschwitz. De Gaulle faces a tank, challenging the French to stand and fight, and the posters in front of him in the mural support the Resistance.