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David Klugman

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Extrait de "La Maison de la Rua Barata Salgueiro 1940 - Lisbonne - 1941 - par David Kugman - Génie- 1re DFL"
Revue de la France libre N°268 :

"Notre abri contenait aussi un local qui était loué au Club français, composé de vichystes qui s'y retrouvaient un jour par semaine. Ce jour-là nous nous rendions invisibles.
Parmi les occupants, certains sont restés gravés dans ma mémoire, d'autres non. Ainsi, je vois très bien une famille belge (dont la jeune fille qui m'avait ouvert la porte le pre­mier jour), avec une mère autoritaire, qui força ses enfants à retourner en Belgique avec elle, malgré leurs protestations. Il y avait un journaliste anglais, du nom de Williams, avec sa femme française et leurs deux garçons. Et puis, il y avait les FFL en puissance.
Je revois le sous-lieutenant Soulet, d'AIbi, cyrard, et son copain Antico, aspirant de réserve. Ce dernier parlait l'espa­gnol et les avait piloté à travers l'Espagne. Soulet devait tom­ber au combat. J'ai revu Antico un instant, la nuit de la prise de Takrouna, en mai 1943, en Tunisie. Je crois qu'il était artilleur.
Alexandre Le Sergent, un breton roux, trapu, était arrivé avec un garçon fluet, nommé Seignol (souvent les arrivants venaient par deux).
Il y avait un docteur, Jaeger, que je revis, fin 1941, médecin militaire à bord du Chantilly sur l'Atlantique Sud.
Un coiffeur de Londres, nommé Boiteux, citoyen britannique expatrié au Kenya, nous rendit jaloux, car très vite il réussit à partir, grâce à sa nationalité.
Un garçon de Caen, dont le nom m'échappe, rêvait de libé­rer sa ville en parachutant; un autre avait l'habitude de parler très clairement en dormant et racontait son évasion nuit après nuit.
Je revois les trois frères Munoz, de Valence (Drôme), je crois, dont l'un, Raphaël, devait tomber au combat.
Il y avait des Cubains, dont les envolées verbales me don­nèrent un avant-goût des harangues de Castro.
Il y a avait aussi deux déserteurs de l'armée espagnole, Hermosilla Lara, à la mine enjouée, et son camarade Vasquez, plus austère, anti-franquistes tous les deux"

De gauche à droite : le sous-lieutenant Soulet et l'auteur au parc Edouard VII à Lisbonne, décembre 1940.

Laurent Laloup le dimanche 24 août 2008 - Demander un contact

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"The Resistance fought Germans in the '40s, revisionists in the '90s
EDVINS BEITIKS, Examiner reporter.

Tuesday, February 20, 1996

(02-20) 04:00 PDT FRANCE -- DAVID KLUGMAN remembers his anger after reading the article. It reported revelations in a new book by historian Douglas Porch, "The French Secret Services," and appeared on The Examiner opinion page under the headline, "The French Resistance myth."

"I immediately became indignant," said Klugman, who fought with the Free French 1st Division in World War II.

"I thought, "How dare he?' There are things you cannot deny. To deny the Resistance is like denying the Holocaust. It is absurd."

Monique Sisich, now 75, was a member of the French underground after Germany defeated and occupied France in 1940. She was captured in 1941 and sent to concentration camps in Germany and Poland. She talked about the anger that swept through the Bay Area's French community in the wake of the article about Porch's book - phone calls from one veteran to another, questioning why this had to appear, 50 years after the end of the war.

"Right away I thought of my comrades who were shot down in firing squads, singing "Les Marseillaise,' " said Sisich, who resides in Redwood City. "For me, it was a feeling of despair - all those people I fought with, their lives seem to have been in vain, their sacrifice doesn't seem to have left an imprint."

Alain Le Gourrierec, French consul-general in San Francisco, said, "When I read the article, my reaction was surprise, disbelief and sorrow, especially sorrow . . . to deny completely the Resistance, this goes beyond imagination."

Instead, "The French Secret Services" says the Resistance was hardly a factor before or after D-Day, that the underground movement was much weaker than believed. It suggests the Resistance was sometimes as mercenary as patriotic, pointing out that rescuers could be paid upward of $5,000 for spiriting downed fliers and Allied prisoners out of France.

The book prompted The Examiner's Paris correspondent to write, "The romantic image of selfless French men and women in berets and leather jackets blowing up bridges and ambushing columns of German soldiers on lonely country roads has become one of the most persistent wartime legends . . . (but) almost nothing of the sort actually happened."

Insisting "only about 5 percent of the French were even nominally members of the underground," and "a number of people grew rich from the Resistance," reporter Bernard D. Kaplan added, "Porch's work is significant because the yawning gap between wartime reality and myth is at the center of the self-doubt that has been nagging at the French psyche for the last 50 years."

For French military veterans now living in this area, that cut to the bone.

Klugman, 76, past president of the French War Veterans of Northern California, pointed out the population of wartime France was about 40 million "and 5 percent of 40 million is 2 million. Two million is a lot of people.

"There were so many variables of resistance," he said.

"Passive resistance, violent resistance, resistance from the inside, resistance from the outside . . . "

Klugman fought with the Free French 1st Division alongside the British in North Africa, then landed with his unit in the South of France as part of D-Day operations. To him, it is hard to believe anyone could discount the efforts of the French to fight off the Germans, before and after D-Day.

Klugman pointed to German murders of everyone living in Oradour and the destruction of that village after the D-Day invasion - retribution taken by an SS division angered at delays and detours the French made in the division's train route from Toulouse to Normandy.

"The village has never been rebuilt," Klugman said.

"To the French, this is our symbol of martyrdom, our Lidice."

There were hundreds of other examples of French Resistance, said Klugman, author of "The Conspiracy of the Righteous," a history of one French village's fight to protect Jews from a German pogrom.

There was the Battle of Vercors between the Resistance and German mountain troops in the foothills of the Alps. There were the hundreds of downed fliers helped out of France through the underground railroad. There were the political prisoners, sent to concentration camps, who continued to help the Allies.

Sisich, who spent four years in the camps, remembered small victories stolen from the Germans. Assigned to spoon out soup to fellow prisoners, she was told Jews were to get only the hot water at the top of the pot, but she managed to dip into the bottom of the soup for a few pieces of matted potato.

The war is two generations removed from memory. People forget, said Sisich. She said even the cadets in France's military academy told her the Resistance didn't do much until the Germans were in full retreat.

Sitting in the office of the consul-general, her eyes brimming with tears, Sisich said:

"I think what is forgotten, sometimes, is how people were scared for their lives, taking a chance they would be killed because they were overflowing with love for their country, for France."

French high school students have to be reminded of the Resistance's contribution, said Klugman, and the message is lost on many.

"Since then there have been other wars - Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, the Gulf War. World War II, it is getting to be ancient history, like the battles of Napoleon, the battles of Louis XIV."

Le Gourrierec said a unified Europe, supported by France, was created in part by French politicians who fought in the underground and were sick of a century of war.

"There were collaborators in France," he acknowledged,

"but there were also people just trying to survive, trying to stay alive, and there was a Resistance - a strong Resistance movement."

There is no denying some French were satisfied to collaborate with the Germans.

"There were these French Nazis, if you will, who dishonored France," said Kaplan, "but the others, those who fought, they were the honor of France."

And for veterans of the Resistance, the honor of France is everything.

Edvins Beitiks, an Examiner reporter and sports writer, interviewed Monique Sisich in June of 1994 on her return to Normandy for services marking the 50th anniversary of D-Day.<

This article appeared on page A - of the Examiner"

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"Commemorating 50 Years Since Nazi Surrender
Benjamin Pimentel, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, May 8, 1995

Monique Sisich fought the good fight as a courier for the French Resistance and as a prisoner of war in Nazi concentration camps.

Yesterday, she remembered those times of courage and sacrifice with about 300 people -- mostly World War II veterans and their families -- who gathered at San Francisco's Notre Dame des Victoires church to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Nazi Germany's surrender that ended the war in Europe.

``I am always thinking of the day I was freed,'' said Sisich, now 74, who wore a light blue shirt decorated with war medals. ``This year, there is much more impact. Fifty years -- it's just something special.''

Victory in Europe Day will also be remembered by the U.S. Sixth Army today with an afternoon ceremony on Pershing Square at the Presidio, where a 15-round cannon salute will honor those killed during the war.

At the Notre Dame des Victoires, French and American flags decorated the 139-year-old church where a Mass was celebrated to honor the war's victims, heroes and survivors. An honor guard of war veterans also presented the colors of the other Allied nations.

``All of us, young and old, we remember that together we were able to get that victory,'' the Rev. Etienne Siffert, the church's pastor, said during the Mass.

Sisich, now a Peninsula resident and a member of the Northern California chapter of the French War Veterans, relayed coded messages on German troop movements to the Allies. She was later captured and spent the rest of the war in concentration camps, where she was severely tortured by the Nazis.

For years after the war ended, Sisich said, she tried to ``obliterate'' memories of her experiences. But she eventually learned to live with her past, and now regularly visits her former colleagues in the French Resistance.

``I try to keep in touch with my old comrades, but they are vanishing little by little,'' she said.

Some at the service praised those who led the struggle against the Nazis.

David Klugman, 75, another former French Resistance member, remembered how French General Charles de Gaulle organized and inspired the French Resistance against the Nazis.

It was not an easy task, he said, for the Nazi occupation really tore France apart.

``It was like an earthquake,'' he said. ``The whole country collapsed.''

Others still spoke with passion against their former enemies.

Henry Planel, a 71-year-old former French underground fighter who now lives in San Francisco, recalled with bitterness how the Nazis and the Fascists killed millions of people.

Among those who attended the service were crew members of the Jeremiah O'Brien, the last seagoing Liberty ship, which returned to Europe last year to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Europe.

The Jeremiah O'Brien crew members came to honor one of those who made the historic voyage -- Francois Le Pendu, a decorated veteran of the Free French Navy, who helped organize the ship's journey.

Le Pendu, who was born in France and lived in San Francisco, became ill after returning from Europe. He died in December at age 70."

sfgate.info/ 
(the San Francisco Chronicle)

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" The September tour will be led by David Klugman of Oakland, a veteran of the French Army who saw action in North Africa and the South of France. Centering on the villages and towns of the Dauphine, it will include a tour of the mountain battlefield of Vercors - where Resistance forces fought German troops - and a ceremony in the main square of Prelenfrey, a Catholic village where some 30 Jewish families sought refuge during the war from Nazi searches."

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" It was this tradition of hospitality that led them to take in and shelter the desperate Jews who were to show up on their doorsteps only a few years later. By then, my father was gone, having escaped from France clandestinely, and having joined the Free French Army under General de Gaulle. Because he was away fighting during the entire war, he knew nothing about what was going on in Prelenfrey. Nor did he give the village any thought afterwards. After the war, everything was different. His mother had been taken away and murdered at Auschwitz; he had married my mother in Palestine during the war; he had to start making a living and supporting a family. And in 1948, facing food and housing shortages in France, my parents, with 13-month-old me, made a grand move to California, an adopted homeland that treated them well and where they adjusted happily. We were a bilingual, bicultural family, but we were Americans foremost and became naturalized American citizens at the first opportunity."

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"David Klugman
La Conspiration des justes : le silence du village de Prélenfrey-du-Guâ sauva des enfants et des adultes juifs en 1944
Ed. Lacour-Ollé - Colporteur - 1994

Sous l'Occupation, la population de Prélenfrey (Isère) s'est accrue de cinquante-et-un réfugiés juifs, dont vingt enfants. Malgré la propagande antisémite du pouvoir, malgré les sévices de la Gestapo, il ne s'est pas trouvé un seul habitant pour dénoncer les réfugiés.
[Préface de Serge Klarsfeld]"

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Les sentiers de la liberté De Claude Muller  :

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