Père Marie-Benoît and Jewish Rescue

Susan Zuccotti

Description

2014 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award, Gold Winner, History

Read an excerpt from the book. Listen to an IU Press podcast with Susan Zuccotti.

Susan Zuccotti narrates the life and work of Père Marie-Benoît, a courageous French Capuchin priest who risked everything to hide Jews in France and Italy during the Holocaust. Who was this extraordinary priest and how did he become adept at hiding Jews, providing them with false papers, and helping them to elude their persecutors? From monasteries first in Marseille and later in Rome, Père Marie-Benoît worked with Jewish co-conspirators to build remarkably effective Jewish-Christian rescue networks. Acting independently without Vatican support but with help from some priests, nuns, and local citizens, he and his friends persisted in their clandestine work until the Allies liberated Rome. After the conflict, Père Marie-Benoît maintained his wartime Jewish friendships and devoted the rest of his life to Jewish Christian reconciliation. Papal officials viewed both activities unfavorably until after the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), 1962-1965.

To tell this remarkable tale, in addition to her research in French and Italian archives, Zuccotti personally interviewed Père Marie-Benoît, his family, Jewish rescuers with whom he worked, and survivors who owed their lives to his network.

Preface
Acknowledgments
1 Pierre Péteul: Family Heritage and Education
2 Pierre Péteul and the First World War
3 The Years between the Wars, 1919-1939
4 First Steps toward Jewish Rescue: Marseille, May 1940 to August 1942
5 With Joseph Bass in Marseille, August 1942 to June 1943
6 With Angelo Donati in Nice, November 1942 to June 1943
7 Père Marie-Benoît and the Donati Plan, June to September 1943
8 Early Rescue in Rome, September and October 1943
9 With Stefan Schwamm in Rome: Securing Documents for Jewish Rescue
10 With Stefan Schwamm in Rome: Securing Funds for Jewish Rescue
11 After the Liberation of Rome
12 The Final Decades
Epilogue

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Religión
• Segunda Guerra Mundial
• Catholic Church
• General officer
• Military
• World War II
• Catholic
• Christianity
• General
• Seconde Guerre mondiale

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 04 juin 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253008664
• Langue: English

Extrait

Photograph courtesy of Rachel Hallman Schutz
PÈRE MARIE-BENOÎT AND JEWISH RESCUE
How a French Priest Together with Jewish Friends Saved Thousands during the Holocaust
Susan Zuccotti
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS      Bloomington & Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931
© 2013 by Susan Zuccotti
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences–Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48–1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zuccotti, Susan, [date]
Père Marie-Benoît and Jewish rescue : how a French priest together with Jewish friends saved thousands during the Holocaust / Susan Zuccotti.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-00853-4 (cloth : alkaline paper) – ISBN 978-0-253-00866-4 (ebook) 1. Marie-Benoît, le Bourg d'Iré, 1895–1990. 2. Righteous Gentiles in the Holocaust – France – Marseille – Biography. 3. Capuchins – France – Marseille – Biography. 4. Priests – France – Marseille – Biography. 5. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945) – France – Marseille. 6. World War, 1939–1945 – Jews – Rescue – France – Marseille. 7. Jews – France – Marseille – History – 20th century. 8. Marseille (France) – History – 20th century. 9. Marseille (France) – Biography. I. Title.
D 804.66.M337Z82 2013
940.53’18350944912 – dc23
2012047187
1  2  3  4  5    18  17  16  15  14  13
To
NICK , EMMA , SOPHIE , ROBBY , CASSIE , and NOAH
The heroic and fabulous feats of Father Marie-Benoît in rescuing Jews from the Gestapo during the Nazi occupation of Rome should inspire us in the United States to protect and respect the civil rights of all people regardless of how they may differ from us in race, color, or creed. Father Benoît saw the human dignity in the persecuted Jews and repeatedly risked his life to rescue them from the Gestapo and the incineration camps awaiting them. He blazed a trail for all of us to follow in protecting the civil and human rights of our fellow citizens and in thus respecting their dignity as fellow human beings.
PRESIDENT LYNDON B. JOHNSON Pageant , November 1964
I have a tree planted in the alley of the Righteous at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. This tree does not only represent me, it also represents the courageous Jews with whom I fought and without whom I would not have achieved a great deal.
PÈRE MARIE-BENOÎT 1975
Contents
Acknowledgments
• Introduction
1 Pierre Péteul: Family Heritage and Education
2 Pierre Péteul and the First World War
3 The Years between the Wars, 1919 to 1939
4 First Steps toward Jewish Rescue: Marseille, May 1940 to August 1942
5 With Joseph Bass in Marseille, August 1942 to June 1943
6 With Angelo Donati in Nice, November 1942 to June 1943
7 Père Marie-Benoît and the Donati Plan, June to September 1943
8 Early Rescue in Rome, September and October 1943
9 With Stefan Schwamm in Rome: Securing Documents for Jewish Rescue
10 With Stefan Schwamm in Rome: Securing Funds for Jewish Rescue
11 After the Liberation of Rome
12 The Final Decades
•  Epilogue
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
MY LIST OF ACKNOWLEDGMENTS OF ASSISTANCE KINDLY GIVEN and gratefully received must necessarily begin with Père Marie-Benoît himself. I met this remarkable Capuchin priest on April 25, 1988, at the monastery in the rue Boissonade in Paris, where he spent the last three decades of his life. He was ninety-three years old at the time of my interview, a large man but frail and hard of hearing. Yet he was still willing to give time and attention to a stranger. Under the circumstances, not all of my questions could be answered, but the impression I received of a kind and gentle man has stayed with me ever since. When we met I did not know how ill he was, or that he would be leaving the monastery within a year for the rest home for elderly Capuchins in Angers, where he would pass away on February 5, 1990.
As I was leaving the monastery, a slightly younger man who also had an appointment with Père Marie-Benoît arrived. He introduced himself as Stefan Schwamm, the Jewish lawyer from Vienna with whom Père Marie-Benoît had worked in Rome during the Second World War to rescue thousands of refugees. The two men had remained close friends for the rest of their lives. My acquaintance with Stefan Schwamm was brief, but I was grateful for it; the other Jewish friends with whom Père Marie-Benoît had cooperated in rescue operations were all deceased. Mr. Schwamm appeared to me then exactly as he seemed in the documents I later studied: lively and curious; charming where Père Marie-Benoît was reserved; loquacious where Père Marie-Benoît was reticent. He must have wondered who I was and why Père Marie-Benoît had agreed to see me. After I left, Père Marie-Benoît would have explained my presence to him, adding, “How could I say no?” He said the same about the thousands of Jewish refugees who knocked on his doors between 1940 and 1944.
Stefan Schwamm died six years later, on February 9, 1994. When I examined his personal archives in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in 2010, it appeared that his visit to Père Marie-Benoît when I saw him may have been his last. Previously he had visited often. Time was running out for these two elderly gentlemen that day in 1988, but both were willing to share their memories. Perhaps they were eager to do so, lest the most important events of their lives be forgotten. I wish I could tell them in person how grateful I am.
Years later, when I began to seriously study the life and times of Père Marie-Benoît, I had several technical concerns. From prior research I knew that I would have little difficulty finding material about that Capuchin priest's wartime rescue activities. I had already worked in two comprehensive Jewish archives – the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine ( CDJC ) at the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris and the Centro de documentazione ebraica contemporania ( CDEC ) in Milan – and I was aware that there was ample material about Père Marie-Benoît in those two vast collections of documents. But I was much less certain about whether I would be able to unearth information about the priest's childhood and early education, or his military service and religious training. Equally daunting, would I be able to learn anything about how he spent the many postwar years of his long life?
I need not have worried. Beginning at the beginning, I traveled to the tiny village of Le Bourg d'Iré, in western France not far from Angers, where Père Marie-Benoît was born in 1895. There I had the good fortune to meet Jean-Pierre and Jocelyn Legourgeois. Jean-Pierre, the author of several volumes of the history of Le Bourg d'Iré from the Middle Ages to the present, seemed to know the genealogies of every resident of the village. He knew all about the family of Pierre Péteul, the boy who, upon ordination, would take the name Père Marie-Benoît. Not only did he share that family's genealogy with me, but he also drove me around the village, showing me the ruins of the mill and house where Pierre Péteul/Père Marie-Benoît was born and explaining the social and economic structure of a French region at the end of the nineteenth century. And then he invited me home for lunch. I was deeply impressed by this example of French hospitality. My gratitude to Jean-Pierre and Jocelyn is beyond words.
Through Jean-Pierre Legourgeois, I was able to meet three of the children of Père Marie-Benoît's brothers, now living in Angers. These included another Pierre Péteul, the son of Père Marie-Benoît's brother Louis, with his wife Christiane; Françoise Péteul Huet, the daughter of Louis; and Marie-Joseph Péteul Zenit, one of the four children of another brother, Joseph. These individuals remembered the priest well and were delighted to talk about his many visits. They proudly shared photographs, military records, certificates of honors received, and other mementos of the life of Père Marie-Benoît. I thank them for their great kindness.
The search for records of Père Marie-Benoît's military service and religious training took me back to the same Capuchin monastery in Paris where I had met him in 1988 and where he had spent the last thirty years of his life. His personal papers are in the Archives des Capucins de France ( ACF ), maintained at the monastery along with the Bibliothèque franciscaine des capucins. Carefully preserved are letters he wrote from the trenches during the First World War to his spiritual mentor in Holland, and the tiny notebook where he jotted down appointments and meetings, with some gaps, from the time of his arrival as a student in Rome in 1921 until 1961. Other documents include letters to and from other priests, religious superiors, and friends, mostly Jews; newspaper clippings about items of interest to him, mostly regarding Jews; reviews of books of similar interest; greeting cards and notes from grateful survivors whom he had helped; and much, much more. Through this material I was able to decipher the life and times of Père Marie-Benoît. Making it all available, often with explanations, were Marie-Hélène de Bengy, Cécile de Cacqueray, Pierre Moracchini, Frère Dominique Mouly, Anne le Bastard, and Monika Bem. Without their assistance this book would not have been possibl