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Operation Yellow Star / Black Thursday

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A damning inquiry of French-Nazi collaboration by an investigative journalist who survived the largest roundup of Jews in France.
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  • 27 June 2017
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Two books by Maurice Rajsfus, a French activist and former investigative journalist for Le Monde, who shares his research and personal recollections in order to shed new light on France's role in the Holocaust. 

In the first volume, "Operation Yellow Star," Rajsfus meticulously analyzes archival documents, demonstrating the extent of police collaboration with the Vichy regime and how it facilitated the persecution, deportation, and ultimately the death of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Examining long-unseen arrest records and transcripts, Rajsfus seeks to understand how and why many average French citizens resisted Nazi occupation while others were willingly complicit. In the second book, "Black Thursday," Rajsfus recounts his own experiences of July 16, 1942, when he and his family were arrested as part of the Vel’ d'Hiv roundup, the largest ever in France, of 13,000 Jews. While most of those detained during the two-day sweep eventually died in Auschwitz, the author survived and has spent the rest of his life grappling with his country's betrayal. Together, the two volumes by Rajsfus offer a damning exposé of the bureaucracy of genocide, laying bare how cultural bias, political self-interest, and the influence of right-wing media led to the implementation of the Yellow Star as a segregationist device and determined France’s culpability in the Holocaust.

Maurice Rajsfus is the author of thirty books and from 1994–2012 he created and circulated "Que fait la police," a "Cop Watch" bulletin detailing human rights abuses. He lives in Paris with his wife, sons and grandchildren.

Phyllis Aronoff has won the Jewish Literary Award for translation and the translation prize from the Quebec Writers' Federation. She was president of the Literary Translators' Association of Canada and from 2007–2015 represented translators on the Public Lending Right Commission of Canada.

Mike Mitchell (b. 1941) is an award-winning translator of French and German who has been active as a translator for over thirty years. In 2012 the Austrian Ministry of Education, Art and Culture awarded him a lifetime achievement award as a translator of literary works. He lives in Scotland.

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Price: $19.95
Pages: 288
Publisher: DoppelHouse Press
Imprint: DoppelHouse Press
Publication Date: 27 June 2017
Trim Size: 9.50 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780997003499
Format: Paperback
BISACs:

HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century / Holocaust, HISTORY / Europe / France, HISTORY / Military / World War II

If [Rajsfus] still wishes to recall how scrupulously — and even with zeal — the French police applied Nazi orders, he also wants to warn us against certain xenophobic or discriminatory speech still heard recently that could lead to behavior of that bygone age.
Ekaitza
Mike Mitchell (b. 1941) is an award-winning translator of French and German who has been active as a translator for over thirty years. He is the recipient of the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for translations of German works published in Britain, has won the British Comparative Literature Association translation competition three times, and has been shortlisted for many awards including the French-American Translation Prize, the Weidenfeld prize, the Aristeion prize, the Kurt Wolff prize, and the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger. In 2012 the Austrian Ministry of Education, Art and Culture awarded him a lifetime achievement award as a translator of literary works. He lives in Scotland.
Author's Preface to the English Edition

Book One - Operation Yellow Star
Note
Honor and Discipline
In the Service of Immoral Laws
The Stages of Humiliation
Toward the Yellow Star
A Little History
The Preliminaries
Preparations
Hunting Them Down
The Requests for Special Dispensation
Non-Jews Wearing the Badge
A Compliant Press
Toward Liberation
The Red Line

Book Two - Black Thursday: The Round-up of July 16, 1942

Preface

Part One
Twelve Hours of Anxiety

[untitled chapters 1-15]

Part Two: No Witnesses, No Crime!
Local Amnesia
The Police Have Forgotten
The Bus Drivers Did Their Job
Vincennes City Hall Has No Information
What About the Churches?
My City Has Lost Its Memory

Part Three: Survivor of the Absurd
Memories, a User’s Guide
Lost Children...

Appendix - Interview with Maurice Rajsfus