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THE ORIGINS OF THE
STANLEY HOFFMANN WE KNEW
Some Comparisons on his Vichy Years
with My Family Story
Peter Gourevitch

ABSTRACT
Stanley Hoffmann’s years in France before, during, and after Vichy marked him
both intellectually and psychologically. Many of his great works draw on hisreflections on how he saw French people responding to this situation. By coincidence, my family was living in France from 1933 to 1940 as refugees from Nazi
Berlin, where they had gone in 1923 as Menshevik refugees from the Bolsheviks.
This essay explores Hoffmann’s story as a way of framing my own family history,
and it reflects on the way those experiences influence our lives and ideas.
Hoffmann went on to great prominence writing on international relations andthe politics of France. Under his influence, I went on to help erode the academic boundary between domestic affairs and international relations.

KEYWORDS
education, family networks, flight from Paris, personal chance, role of Vichy,

When I first met Stanley Hoffmann in the fall of 1963, he did not speak about
his experiences in wartime France.* It was not just that I was a first year graduate student and he already a rising star of the professorial firmament, people
did not share such personal experiences then. We were nearer in time to WorldWar II, so that discourse about its traumas had not yet emerged. Only late in
his career did Hoffmann write in a personal way about his years under Vichy.
In doing so, he reflected a cultural change toward the expression of personal
narrative. It became publicly more acceptable and indeed something of animperative. Perhaps it expressed even an internal need as people aged.
At the same time, there was more discussion about the Holocaust in generaland about the French war years in particular. Hoffmann had long been interested in Vichy, taught courses about it at Harvard, some co-taught with Patrice
French Politics, Culture & Society, Vol. 35, No. 2, Summer 2017: 1–20
© The Institute of French Studies at New York University and the
Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University
doi:10.3167/fpcs.2017.350202

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Higonnet, and spoke at times to colleagues that he planned to write a major
book about Vichy. He never published such a volume, but there are a number ofsources from which we can construct a good idea of his views and his experiences. These are Hoffmann’s scholarly publications, such as the renowned“Aspects du régime de Vichy,”1 “Self -Ensnared: Collaboration with Nazi Germany,”2 and “In the Looking Glass: Sorrow and Pity?”3 reprinted in a substantial collection of essays4 that included notable pieces on Charles de Gaulle;
contributions to important volumes such as La France des années noires, edited byauthorities on Vichy Jean-Pierre Azéma and François Bérarida5; essays in journals
such as Esprit6; reviews of other books like the important work by Robert Paxton,7 which helped open the lid on French compliance with the Occupiers andNazi terrorism; class notes from the course he taught in the 1980s “France’s
Decline and Renovation, 1934–1946l”;8 essays about his personal experiences,published in a Festschrift edited by Linda Miller and Joseph Smith; and finally,
reviews of movies that were important vehicles of his analysis.9
Cinema had a strong impact on public discourse and on Hoffmann, wholoved movies, wrote reviews, and assigned them in his classes. In the course on
Vichy, he assigned Renoir’s La Marseillaise, La Grande Illusion, and Les Règles dujeu; Marcel Ophuls’ Le Chagrin et la Pitié (the very big 1972 movie Hoffmann
discusses at length in the article noted above); Clouzot’s films; Cayatte’s Le
Passage du Rhin; Costa Gravas’ Section spéciale and Malle’s Lacombe Lucien. Not
on the 1986 list was Louis Malle’s Au revoir les enfants (1987), a story achingly
close to Hoffmann’s experience of witnessing a friend taken away in Nice
whom he was never to see again.
The Klaus Barbie extradition from Bolivia in 1983 and trial in Lyon in
1987 and other legal cases of Rene Bousquet, Jean Leguay, Maurice Papon, andPaul Touvier brought further awareness of the Vichy years. Serge and Beate
Klarsfeld found and published train lists from Drancy to the killing camps,
showing the complicity of the French state. The movie Schindler’s List (1993)
and the creation of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington contributed to even more public discussion. Ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, South
East Asia, and Rwanda broadened the consideration of genocide. Hoffmanntaught courses and wrote on morality in international relations. He encouraged and advised Samantha Power in writing the much-discussed history of
genocide, A Problem from Hell.10
By the 1990s and the last years of Hoffmann’s life, the Vichy period had
become more central to public discourse, while the general culture of silence
around private history had changed in universities. People began to talk, andHoffmann joined them. His stories resonated with my family history, though
I was not fully conscious of the overlap when I first met Hoffmann. I arrived
at Harvard as a graduate student in the fall of 1963 and enrolled in his French
Politics class. Hoffmann had survived the escape from Paris in June 1940, life
under Vichy, and then under direct German Occupation. My parents had initially fled from Russia to Berlin in 1923, then to Paris in March 1933, and to

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The Origins of the Stanley Hoffmann We Knew

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the United States in October 1940. They left Paris nearly the same day as the
Hoffmanns (they on June 12 by car, my parents by train). A great-uncle, mygrandmother’s brother, went to Nice, living there about the same time the
Hoffmanns did. When the SS arrived in Nice in 1943, the Hoffmanns escaped
into the French countryside; my great-uncle and his wife did not, and like
Klarsfeld’s father, were caught and sent to Auschwitz. Over time, I havelearned more about my family story, and I have learned more about Hoffmann’s. In this essay, I use this overlap to explore issues of choice and support
in the problem of survival, and how these might have influenced Hoffmann’sideas and “mental map” more generally.
For most of my life, I have been aware of my family narratives of flight andmigration. As a child I used to hear, and ask to be told, the stories as my parents
talked to their fellow refugees and relatives. As an adult I began to gather documents, not with the purpose of doing history or social science, but out of
curiosity about evidence that might document the experience my family had
with some of the monumental events of twentieth-century history. My
encounter with Hoffmann in 1963, and the emerging Center for European
Studies (formed in 1969) as I moved from graduate student to Assistant Professor that same year, certainly influenced the way I experienced the construction,and the understanding, of that trajectory. It is in evocation of Hoffmann’smemory that I try to recount it here as a kind of interactive narrative.

The Hoffmann Trajectory
When I first heard details of Hoffmann’s story, I was intrigued by several parallels in his mother’s decision making options and that of my family: mostnotably, the departure from Paris in June 1940, and second, leaving Nice forthe countryside when the Germans and SS arrived in fall 1943. Hoffmann’s
most explicit description of these events lies in the chapters he wrote for thevolume edited by Linda Miller and Michael J. Smith.11 Hoffmann had had anappendicitis operation 10 May 1940, the day the German assault in the Westbegan. He was slow to recover, so his mother delayed their exit, finallybundling him into a car with friends. So great was the famous crush of
refugees during the exodus from Paris, it took them three days to reach Tours.
Hoffmann evokes a movie to describe the chaos: René Clément’s Forbidden
Games. Mrs. Hoffmann knew the danger: after the Anschluss her brothers had
fled Vienna for Paris, then to England, the US or Australia, though one invalid
brother stayed in Paris, where Vichy police later rounded him up for deportation to his death in 1943.
The Hoffmanns went to Bordeaux, and then left to escape the Occupied
zone. They found their way to Lamalou-les-Bains in Languedoc, a small spa
town, where they had visited friends the previous year. After the summer of
1940, they went on to Nice so Stanley could be in school, leaving everything

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in Paris except Mrs. Hoffmann’s jewels, which were soon sold to fund theirliving costs. They lived poorly as refugees. Nice was ruled by Vichy from 1940
to 1942 and by Italy from 1942 to 1943, during which time the city was comparatively safe for the many refugees living there, including, as I explore
below, for my great-uncle and aunt.
Nonetheless, Mme Hoffmann, Stanley discovered later, felt sufficiently
endangered to have obtained entrance visas to the US, despite Stanley’s reluctance to leave. How did she get them, and how did her brothers get their visas
in 1940, as it was notoriously difficult to get such visas in that period? We
don’t know. Hoffmann writes “then came Pearl Harbor and we could notleave,” though the causality is not quite clear. When the Allies invaded North
Africa in the fall of 1942 Germany took over direct rule of Vichy, and Italy
occupied Nice along with most of Provence and Corsica. Refugees remained
safe under the Italians because Italy resisted German pressure to “surrender on
demand” the people they wanted, including Jews.
Then rapid change took place. Mussolini was overthrown after the Allied
victory in Sicily in the summer of 1943, the new Italian government switchedsides to join the Allies, and Germany invaded and seized control of Italy toprevent this. This swift chain of events brought the SS directly to Nice.
Roundups of Jews began immediately. Hoffmann watched from the balcony of
their building his close friend seized coming home, the boy’s mother rushingdownstairs to save him, only to be whisked away herself, both never to beheard of again. Despite the growing risk, the Hoffmanns stayed three moremonths, as Stanley did not wish to leave his lycée. Finally, “my nerves cavedin.”12 The writing implies Hoffman influenced decisions, despite his youth; hisfamily consulted each other, on when to stay, when to leave. Hoffmann’s history teacher forged French papers, in case of a police demand in the train, andthey left at night, back to Lamalou.
The Hoffmanns returned to find the town full of German soldiers. The villagers had sons in the maquis, where they had fled to escape expulsion to Germany for forced labor. Relations were tense, but there seemed to be modus
vivendi, a kind of tacit stand-down between the two sides and not much violence. Those who knew or guessed the family’s vulnerability protected the
Hoffmanns. Statistically, they ranked fortunate as among the foreign born,
who had the least protection from roundups, though even the native born
became vulnerable as the SS bore down. In less than a year came D-Day andsoon enough liberation. The Hoffmanns returned to Paris, to Neuilly, where
Hoffmann reentered the lycée, passed his exams, and enrolled at Sciences Po.
His lack of French nationality blocked him from the concours which led to the
aggrégation and access to the École normale or the grands corps. At age eighteen
he became eligible for and attained French citizenship, no longer stateless, as
he had been after the Nazis took over Austria. At Sciences Po his brilliance, evident in high school, continued, and eventually brought him to Harvard,
where he became the famous intellectual we knew.

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The Origins of the Stanley Hoffmann We Knew

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In the Hoffmann story, the key decisions were initially his mother’s: leaving Vienna when Stanley was quite young because she preferred to live inFrance; leaving Paris in 1940 as the German army approached; not emigrating
to the US in the early 1940s, but critically leaving Nice in 1943 after the Nazis
arrived. They were fortunate not to have been rounded up in the few months
before they left for Lamalou; Stanley seems to have played a role in delaying
the departure, but then agreed to leave and worked with the lycée teacher
to get forged papers. And they were lucky to have contacts in Lamalou who
protected them.
I knew some elements of the Hoffmann story, but did not parse carefully
the dates and the decision points until I began to work systematically on thedetails of my own family story. Comparing the two helps understand the decision points for each.

The Garvy-Gourevitch Trajectory
Whereas the Hoffmann saga starts in Austria, my family’s begins in Imperial
Russia, where all four of my grandparents were born in the last two decades of
the nineteenth century. All four grandparents were Mensheviks, who opposed
the Bolsheviks in the famous 1903 split of the Russian Social Democratic
Workers’ Party. When the Bolsheviks imposed a dictatorship after the Octobercoup of 1917, they gave some of the Mensheviks a choice: leave the country
or face imprisonment, under house arrest away from major population centers, or more severely in Siberian labor camps. Many of the leading Mensheviks left for Berlin in 1920 to 1923, including Iulius Martov, Fedor Dan, David
Dallin, and Rafael Abramovich.13 In January of 1923, my maternal grandfather, Peter Garvy-Bronstein, was brought back by the KGB from prison in the
Urals and told to leave or go back to prison. He left with his wife, Sophie Fichman Bronstein–Garvy, also a Menshevik activist, and my eight-year-old
mother Sylvia and her eleven-year-old brother George.14 My grandmother
Sophie’s brother, Boris Fichman, joined them in Berlin soon after.
At the same time, my paternal grandfather, Boris Ber-Gourevitch, and his
wife, Lydia, stayed in Russia. Documents show that he requested and received
permission to leave on 18 November 1922, but later denied when he moved toact on this on 16 May 1923.15 What happened between those two dates for theSoviets to revoke the original authorization and what caused Boris to delay
until it was too late? According to the family story passed to me, Boris was on
the Menshevik left and thought he could cooperate somehow with the Bolsheviks to bring about constructive change. Or did the Bolsheviks want to control him in the USSR? Or did the family not know about his effort to leave? In
any event, he lived under house arrest in various provincial cities, in increasingly remote places. By the late 1930s he was in prison. In 1939, he waskilled—although the records say he died “under questioning.” In 1931, at age

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15, my father could leave on his own to live with his paternal aunt and uncle
in Berlin. He was thus about the same age as Hoffmann when he and his
mother had to decide when to leave Nice. My grandfather expressed concern
about my father’s opinion concerning whether to stay or go, knowing theywould likely never see each other again. The issue expressed in the lettersturned on education, as my father Shura, like Hoffmann, showed signs ofbeing bright.16 Unlike Hoffmann, he had few educational opportunities in theplaces of his father’s exile in Soviet Russia, such as Siberia
My grandmother, with whom my dad was quite close, was sent to Siberia
in 1937 and survived. She spent twenty-five years there before her release on
Stalin’s death. Freed from police supervision of political prisoners upon “rehabilitation,” in 1962 she tracked my father down in Syracuse, New York via the
Red Cross, who had found his name listed as one of the developers of Tetracyclin and synthetic penicillin in Who’s Who of Science. We met her and someother surviving relatives in Moscow in the 1960s.
After leaving Russia in 1923, the Bronstein-Garvys settled in Berlin, which attracted
Mensheviks because Germany was home of the largest, most established Social Democratic Party in Europe. Grandpa Peter Garvy scraped out a meager living as a writer forthe trade union movement newspaper, Forwards. Garvy had been a prominent leader
in Russia, known for trade union work and political activism in the early Revolution
days.17 The Garvys were densely networked with the Russian Socialist emigrés living in
Berlin and with German Social Democrats. Family photographs show the family with
Karl and Luise Kautsky, another Socialist theorist Pavel Axelrod, and Rafael AbramovichRein, who was to play an important role in helping European labor leaders to escape.
The children of these Mensheviks formed a tight network among themselves. They attended similar schools, went to summer camps for Socialist
youth, and joined the Socialist youth wing of the German Social Democratic
party. Among their friends were Henry Ehrmann, later a noted political scientist in the US and an expert on France; the economist and social theorist Albert
Hirschman; and Willi Brandt, later Chancellor of Germany. They did not reportfeeling a lot of anti-Semitism from “ordinary” Germans. They did recognize thegreat danger from Nazi gangs, as older members of the group trained to fightthem in the streets. As refugees of the Soviet dictatorship, they were also quite
strongly anti-Communist—thus anti-fascist and anti-Bolshevik both.
When the Nazis took power in late January 1933, the Menshevik refugees
felt the threat immediately. The regime pounced quickly on its political enemies, beat them up, threw them in jail, killed some, and hauled many off toconcentration campus such as Dachau, created for Nazi political enemies before
used against Jews. While many if not most of the Mensheviks in Berlin were Jewish, they felt attacked not as Jews but as Socialists, trade unionists, and defenders of the Weimar Republic. The primary experiences of their network confirmed
the menace. They spread news quickly among themselves as the regime made its
assault on the Left specifically and the political opposition generally.

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Legend has it in my family that shortly after the Reichstag Fire in late February of 1933, the phone rang in my grandparents’ apartment. My grandmother answered to hear “Is Herr Doctor Garvy there? This is the Gestapo
calling.” She lied to reply in the negative and a few hours later grandfather
Peter and uncle George were on a train headed to Paris. My mother was sickand came later with my grandmother. Great Uncle Boris followed sometime
thereafter with his wife Olga. My father stayed on to finish his “abitur” (gymnasium graduation degree) and left for Paris in 1934.
The Mensheviks worked with the Socialist network to rebuild life in Paris,drawing on the ample contacts developed from the many international meetings they had attended the preceding decade. The young people entered university, and worked to support their parents. My mother got a scholarship to
the Collège Sévigné and recalled having had Simone de Beauvoir as a philosophy teacher. After finishing university, my father started a Ph.D. in chemistryat the Curie Institute. My mother helped support her family by tutoring; one
source wrote she worked “like a bull.”18 My parents married in the summer of1938 in Paris.
Out of the political turmoil of the 1930s, two particularly dramatic incidents stand out for the way they enveloped my family in important events,
which I studied with Stanley Hoffmann—the Popular Front and the Spanish
Civil War. The Communists had been hostile to the Socialists in Weimar, calling them “social fascists” and refusing to cooperate in stopping the Nazi tide.
In 1933, after seeing German militarism grow and the Nazis destroy both theCommunist and Social Democratic Parties, Stalin decided democracy was
worth preserving. He allowed the Communist parties to cooperate with the”bourgeois“ parties (in France, the Parti radical and the SFIO [Socialists]) in
Popular Front coalitions. For the Mensheviks, this posed a challenge: they had
opposed cooperation with Communist parties in the West until Moscow freed
the many Mensheviks in prison or house arrest in the USSR. As the SFIO gathered for their annual Congress in the summer of 1934, the Mensheviks had todecide whether to continue this opposition in the face of considerable pressure from their French Socialist colleagues who wanted a Popular Front.
Suddenly, a message known as the Kazan Telegram arrived from the USSR:“We hail with joy the United Front. Long live the mutual understanding
between Socialists and Communists throughout the world! Long live unity inaction and fighting! Long live socialism!”19 It was signed by Boris Ber-Gourevitch (my paternal grandfather) and S.O. Ezhov (Tsederbaum) and K.I.
Zakharova, the brother and sister-in-law of Julius Martov, the most famous
Menshevik leader, who died young in 1923, just before the death of Lenin,with whom he had an important relationship. All three signatories of thetelegram were on the left of the Menshevik movement, all three with “impeccable credentials” among the Mensheviks in exile.20
The Soviets had picked my grandfather and Martov’s relatives because
their prominence gave the telegram credence among the exiles. Grandpa Boris

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had been “a longstanding member of the Menshevik Central Committee.”21This helped me understand the story my father told about my grandfather’sarrival in Berlin late in 1931, when senior Mensheviks surrounded and quizzed
him for a long time (“debriefed” we might call it) about all their friends
trapped in the USSR. Politically, the telegram sent a signal from Stalin that
required analysis by the exiles. Abramovich called this telegram “the most significant event in party life of the past several years.”22 In the end, they were all
disappointed that Stalin’s regime did not soften at all internally.
A second important family story concerns the Spanish Civil War, which
exploded in 1936. This event deepened tensions within the Popular Front
coalition. Should France and Britain help the Loyalist side to defend the Spanish Republic, when it became clear Hitler and Mussolini were helping Franco?
People went to Spain to fight with the Loyalists. Terrible things then happenedin Spain, as George Orwell described vividly in Homage to Catalonia. One incident lived in family memory: the disappearance in Spain of Marc Rein, theolder son of Rafael Abramovich, one of the most important of the Menshevik
leaders. Having fallen in love with Ursula Hirschman, Albert’s older sister, Rein
was disappointed when the relationship crumbled. Soon after he left Paris tofight on the Loyalist side. In Spain, he disappeared, never to be heard fromagain. Was he killed by Franco’s side? Or, was he seized by the Communists, aspart of the ferocious struggle for dominance on the Left or as vengeanceagainst Stalin’s enemies, in this case Rein’s father, Abramovich? The Paris Mensheviks believed the latter. Rein was likely killed there in Spain or possibly in
the Soviet Union. In addition to purges at home, Stalin had undertaken attacks
on dissidents abroad. Trotsky’s murder in Mexico City in 1940 is the most
famous case, but many such assassinations had led up to that one.23 The Menshevik group felt the danger. Abramovich traveled often to the US, made contact with US labor leaders, and warned them about the Bolsheviks as well as thefascists. These connections proved important when the crisis of 1940 came. In
the meantime, in Paris, the disappearance of Marc Rein had shaken the Menshevik community considerably and was not forgotten. It was one of the stories I heard growing up. I was quite touched when I met Lisa Hirschman,
younger daughter of Albert, to discover that she, too, knew it well. It was oneof many bonds between me and the woman who became my first wife.
My parents, having no illusions about Hitler, recognized the appeasement
at Munich in 1938 as a catastrophe. But they, and virtually everyone else in
France, did not expect the country’s astonishingly rapid fall in May–June
1940.24 Their fate would henceforth depend on their own decisions, the support and solidarity of others, and chance. As the German armies approached,
the family moved to escape. French rules required exit visas to leave the country. People lined up to get them. Then, Juliette Blanc, the Frenchwoman Uncle
George would soon marry, called the family from the press office where she
worked to say that the news broadcasts were misleading: the German army
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The Origins of the Stanley Hoffmann We Knew

9cast. The family abandoned the exit visa line and went to their homes toprepare to leave.
The next day they went to the Gare de Lyon to take the train south. They
got the last train out, they always told me. When I saw the movie Casablanca
in January 1964 during the traditional Bogart Festival at the Brattle Theater inHarvard Square, I was enrolled in Hoffmann’s course French Politics and Society
and noted the train station scene where Bogart is waiting in pouring rain for
Ingrid Bergman to get out before the Germans arrive. I phoned my Dad to ask
if he remembered the weather that day, and he assured me it had been quite
sunny. He remembered because dry fields meant the German army was rolling
faster than it would have otherwise. My mother confirmed this many years
later, when she described in detail the day that they left, how hot it was in thePlace de la Gare, how they had to fetch water for my fainting grandmother,and how their train suffered bomb attacks on its way south.
The family coordinated to meet in Toulouse outside the area of direct German rule. Safe for a time, the family now had to figure out how to leave
France. They did not feel they could hide somehow, as did Mrs. Hoffmann in1943. In July, the family received a telegram from their close Menshevik
friends, Wolik and Emma Woytinsky,25 who had escaped Berlin in 1933 for
Switzerland, and had been living in Washington since 1935. Dated 6 July
1940, the telegram said, “Whole family authorized visit United States. Contact
American Consul Marseilles. See you soon here. Emma.” The family got thevisas and headed for Lisbon to reach America.
Many things require explanation here. First, and most significantly for thefamily’s survival, how were these visas granted and distributed? Getting into
the US was notoriously difficult, but my family got emergency US entrance
visas because of the American labor movement. In the summer of 1940 several
labor leaders asked the Roosevelt Administration to grant visas to European
trade union leaders trapped in France. The archives contain a letter addressedto Cordell Hull, secretary of state, dated 2 July 1940, on the stationary of theAmerican Federation of Labor and signed by William Green, as president of
the American Federation of Labor and David Dubinsky, president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.26 The letter notes the dangers posed
both by the Nazi Occupation of France and by the Soviet seizure of Lithuania,
which together
have placed in jeopardy the lives of a great number of men and women prominent
in the democratic and labor movements in Europe…. [U]nless these men andwomen find immediate temporary haven in the United States, they are in dangerof being imprisoned, placed in concentration camps or shot, whether it be theGestapo or the GPU (the Soviet Secret Police)…. [T]heir loss would be irreparable forthe civilized world.27

The preparatory lobbying in the US behind this letter came from the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC). This group, the subject of a new study by Cather-

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10Peter Gourevitch

ine Collomp, formed in 1934 in direct response to the collapse of Weimar.28
Nazi destruction of the labor movement in Germany posed a threat to thelarger movement for American leaders. Many of them were Jewish, themselves
refugees from the anti-Semitism of Tsarist Russia and nourished in the Socialist culture of Eastern Europe. They found the combination of anti-Semitism
and anti-labor doubly toxic. In this way, they broke out of the traditional “isolationism” attributed to American labor, which had generally dismissed European issues and debates as no concern to the US. Now they were among thefirst American groups to sound an alarm.
We can see the logic of the labor movement’s argumentation, but we haveto wonder why it worked. After all, Breckinridge Long, the head of the State
Department’s visa granting office, is notorious in the scholarly literature forhis anti-Semitism and his opposition to giving visas to Jews and to leftists ingeneral. His writings29 make clear this prejudice, which extended to all peoplesof Eastern and Southern Europe, a perspective sadly rather common for Americans of his background at that time.
The role of American labor activists in challenging the recalcitrance ofLong and the State Department has not gotten the attention it deserves.
Indeed, when I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington soon after its
opening in 1993, I found a lack of interest in this aspect of the history. The
museum did have a side exhibit on the better-known story of Varian Fry andthe Emergency Rescue Committee that he led in Marseilles. Fry’s activities arefamous because of the cultural importance of the people his group saved:
among them Hannah Arend, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Arthur Koeslter, Wanda
Landowska, Claude Levi Strauss, Jacques Lipchitz, Alma Werfel, Golo andHeinrich Mann, and Max Ophuls.30
But the museum contained nothing about the labor movement’s generalrole in rescuing Jews, and when I talked to museum staff about its importancein my family’s story, my words did not seem to resonate. Fortunately, my
cousin Helen Garvy had in her closet her father’s files and she found there the1940 visa, as well as the telegram from Emma Woytinsky. We mailed a copy ofthe visa to the museum.
From Washington, I went to the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner
Labor Archives at New York University. They reported having had tense relationships with the Holocaust Museum, precisely on the point of how muchattention to pay to the labor story. The Holocaust Museum stressed the overall refusal of the State Department to issue visas to Jews, without, in the viewof the Labor Archive staff, acknowledging the role of US labor. Who was right?
Well, both. Breckinridge Long and US State Department certainly did not do
remotely enough to allow people in danger to come to the US, under-utilizing
even the scarce number of legal visas allowed by law. At the same time, there
were exceptions to this narrative—not only the Fry network, but the laborgroup as well. The historiography has neglected the activism of American
labor in drawing attention to the dangers of Hitler and Stalin and in rescuing

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politically vulnerable people, among them many Jews. Collomp’s recent bookhelps correct the balance.
My family got emergency entrance visas. This raises more questions. Why
did the FDR Administration respond to the appeal of the American labor
movement, and why did the Consulate in Marseilles issue them? On theauthorization of the visas, I would assign an important role to presidential politics and the election of November 1940. Roosevelt needed labor support tocarry New York, among other states. David Dubinsky was the well-known
leader of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union, an important
institution in New York. The ILGWU had many Jewish members, but the key
ingredient in this request was its centrality in the labor movement. FDR
needed their support, moreover, not only for the elections of 1940 but also for
his effort to counter the isolationism still so powerful in Congress and so popular among the American public. Backing from internationalist labor hadcome to matter even more with the fall of France.31 Collomp suggests that
France’s collapse had an immediate impact on Secretary of State Cordell Hulland Assistant Secretary Long, enough so that they responded more sympathetically to the JLC’s interventions than they would have otherwise. How
much FDR may have coaxed them, given his electoral and foreign policy concerns, we do not know definitively.
Could FDR have done more, as some argue? The Roosevelt Administration
has come under severe criticism for not doing more to save Jews and otherpeople in danger.32 Yet, FDR faced the challenge of strong isolationism before
the war. The constraints on him were acute, as American fear of entanglement
in another war were quite strong. Southern conservatives in the Democratic
Party were more internationalist than the Northern Republicans and indeed
than many Northern Democrats. They were thus vital to FDR’s policy ofengaging the US in helping countries resist the Nazis and the Japanese, but
FDR continued to feel isolationist pressure, even after Pearl Harbor. Among thevictims were European Jews. To ensure some internationalist support, FDR
avoided framing the combat with the Nazis in terms of saving Jews. Even thesmall number of visas allowed provoked hostility, and the State Department’s
visa office had Congressional backing for its restrictive policy. African Americans also paid a great price for this difficult politics of internationalism. The
cost of Southern support for the New Deal was that African Americans were
excluded from many of its social programs, as they were from veterans programs after the war. Nothing could menace white control of the South.33 The
Supreme Court approved the internment of Japanese Americans in the West,a decision it ultimately reversed after finding the government withheld evidence that no threat existed.34
Faced with this kind of public hostility and the strain of prejudice in the
US Foreign Service, it is even more surprising that the administration granted
and processed these emergency entrance visas. We know enough about organizational resistance to realize formal approval does not guarantee processing,02-Gourevitch_Layout 1 6/13/17 11:52 AM Page 1212Peter Gourevitch

even if the command comes from the top. We know individuals make a difference. Some consuls are famous for having saved Jews: Aristides de Souza
Mendes of Portugal, who issued visas in Bordeaux against his Salazar government’s orders at the cost of his career, and Chiune Sugihara from Japan who
did likewise in the Baltics. My family’s hero was Hiram Bingham IV, assistantconsul general. His boss, the US consul in Marseilles, was of the Breckenridge
Long variety: quite unsympathetic to the refugees as Jews, leftists, and intellectuals, he followed the official State Department line that the US was not at
war and should not upset the Vichy French government by helping people
escape against its wishes. Bingham, by sharp contrast, was sympathetic, andearly on he supported Fry and the various other organizations operating inMarseilles to help people get out. He signed many visas. Various memoirs andbooks attest to his generosity, even assisting refugees find documents—a driver’s license, a library card, something—to provide a paper that could fill abureaucratic requirement. Without Bingham, the Jewish Labor Committee
and the Varian Fry group’s success in the US could not have occurred. By September 1940 the window was closing, as Long ordered the consuls to tighten
up again. The State Department punished Bingham for his good deeds; in1941, he was transferred to Portugal, then to Argentina, and eventually
pushed out of the Foreign Service altogether.35
The actual visa issued to my uncle George shows Bingham’s signature veryclearly. It shows the various fees they had to pay. How could they afford thesefees, as well as train fares, hotels, and meals? I think the money came from thevarious agencies helping them, such as the JDC (Jewish Distribution Committee) also known as the JOINT (Jewish Joint Distribution Committee).36 Though
they were being helped as labor leaders, Jewish refugee agencies played a bigrole in their physical care.
Even with visas in hand, the Bronstein-Garvy family still had to get to Lisbon, a journey which could have its perils. In early September 1940 they left
Marseilles and travelled to the French town of Cerbère at the Spanish border.
There the border guard objected to the passage of my uncle George because he
was of army age and had no discharge papers. According to family legend, mygrandmother declaimed loudly, “if he does not pass, I will not pass and I will
stay here all day.” The guard let them all go. Why didn’t the guard have themarrested, or just say no? Many people were blocked, famously Walter Benjamin,
who committed suicide. Many people, including some of my parents’ closest
friends, had to climb over the mountains, including a pregnant woman (likemy mother) traveling with her mother, who was not in great health (like mygrandmother). Refugees could find route information and guides in Banyulssur-Mer, which had a Socialist mayor and a resident named Dina Vierny, thecompanion and model of artist Aristide Maillot, and daughter of a RussianSocialist Jewish émigré, who knew and helped the Menshevik group.
Once across the French border, they traveled directly to Lisbon. The
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contingency decision: why did Franco, so staunchly anti-leftist, do this? Thereseems to be no scholarly consensus on this, with opinions ranging from some
sympathy he is alleged to have had toward Jews, to a distance he sought tokeep from Hitler’s grand schemes, to preoccupation with rebuilding Spain after
the destructive civil war, to having some cautious instincts.37 My parents recall
seeing much destruction from the train and during their stop in Madrid on theway to Lisbon. They waited a few weeks for the boat, played bridge, andarrived in the US in early October. Agents from the JOINT greeted them, foundthem places to live, and a bit of money for subsistence. My older brother wasborn in February in a charity ward of a New York hospital. My Dad got a job
as a chemist, and my mother knit sweaters to earn money.
A large part of the maternal family escaped, but a vital and close family
member did not. Boris Fichman, my grandmother’s brother, lived in Nice,surely not far from the Hoffmanns. My mother’s favorite relative, he had takencare of her and her older brother, George, when they were children back in
Russia, and then later in Berlin and Paris, the family hero helping them in
emergencies throughout.
What decisions led to the sharp divergence in the fate of my Grandma
Sophia and her brother Boris? When the Bronstein-Garvys went to Toulousefrom Paris, Boris did not go with them. He and his wife Olga ended up in Nice.
Before that we do know they were in the small town of Usset in central France,
because my uncle George notes in some writing that he stopped by to seethem after leaving the French army on his way to Toulouse. Why did they notstay in this small town, or return to it, as the Hoffmanns did to Lamalou, we
do not know. This was the last time any family member saw them.
When Alois Brunner and the SS arrived in Nice in September 1943, they
arrested Boris and Olga quite soon. They shipped the couple to Drancy andthen on 7 October 1943 on Convoy 60 from Drancy to Auschwitz, where Borisand Olga were killed right away. The family in New York knew the generaldetails soon after the war as news of the camps circulated widely. It was while
visiting the Holocaust Museum in 1993, I discovered the Serge Klarsfeld bookthat published the names of the people on each of the convoys that left
Drancy.38 When I found Boris and Olga’s names on the list, I was stunned.
When my mother saw the list, she became agitated, though she had known
the facts for fifty years. “Why had we not persuaded them to leave? Could wehave done more?” Were they afraid of being a burden on the family? “We are
tired of running,” said the last postcard they sent from France.
From Mary Felstiner’s biography of Charlotte Salomon, I learned that at
Drancy, they took whatever money you had, and gave you a receipt; some ofthese exist, known as the Carnets de Drancy.39 Working through them while sitting at a desk at the Musée de la vie juive in Paris, suddenly there it was:“Received from Boris Fichman, at 1 rue Balégrier, Cannes, 13, 440 francs, the20th of September 1943.” Again, I was stunned that such a document existed.
Almost all the other receipts I saw were for modest sums like 25, 50, 100, or02-Gourevitch_Layout 1 6/13/17 11:52 AM Page 14

14Peter Gourevitch

200 francs. In current purchasing power terms, the Fichman amount was$10,000 or more. I tried to imagine the situation. They knew they were introuble. It seems he had tried to go to Switzerland and had been turned back.
Now he took what he had, hoping what? That he could bribe their way out?
Whatever he thought, they were killed three days after leaving Drancy.
Over sixty years later, in the summer of 2001, I found myself in Cracow,
Poland, not far from Auschwitz. I had gone there with the La Jolla Symphonyand Chorus, with whom I sang bass. I had never wanted to visit a concentration camp. As the choir was visiting Cracow and offering a side trip tour to thecamp, I decided to do it, hoping for safety in the company of my fellow choristers. At Birkenau, where the Fichman’s were most likely killed, I pulled out
Xerox copies of the Kaddish and asked my friends if they would recite it withme. I am not a religious Jew. I knew Dadia Buka was not. I had not read theKaddish, the traditional prayer of mourning, at the funerals of my parents, mybrother, nor my first wife. But Buka was killed for being a Jew. I wanted to“close the circle” somehow, the link to my mother, uncle, and grandparents.
He was the reason I was there. I asked a choir member whom I knew sangoften as a Cantor if he would lead us. “What are we doing?” I heard one of thegroup ask; very few of the group members were Jewish. I explained. We
chanted the words. I found it very meaningful to remember him and Teutia
Olya in this way. One of our group was gay and in a wheel chair. I asked if I
could push him along at the museum. He understood immediately, saying, “itwould have been both of us.”
A few years ago, the French Government announced a plan of restitution
for those who had suffered economic damage as the result of Vichy collaboration with the Nazis. I decided to apply as an heir of my great uncle Boris
Fichman, for the funds taken from him at Drancy. It was not for the money
per se, which, though large among the Drancy victims, was not a big sum bytoday’s standards and tiny compared to the property and art seized. I wanted
in writing the equivalent of a statement of wrongdoing by the French state. I
sought not to condemn France, but some formalized acknowledgment of culpability. So I filed a request to reclaim the 13,000 francs taken from Great
Uncle Boris. The process wound along, and then I was informed there would
be a hearing. Fortunately, Patrice Higonnet, my close friend, former colleague,
expert on Vichy who co-taught with Hoffmann, was in Paris at that time andwent to represent me. Having ascertained my relation to Boris, and that myfamily and I had suffered in some way, the Commission awarded some recompenses to me, my cousin Helen, and the two daughters of my deceased
brother. I had the letter sent me, and I have used the small sum to sustain thisresearch on our family.
To my knowledge Stanley Hoffmann and his mother did not use any ofthese processes of recompense. He notes that they lost the contents of theapartment in Neuilly. Other material grounds for a claim might have belonged
to his mother’s brothers.

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Comparisons: Choices and Structures
Hoffmann appreciated well the gap between generalization for large numbers
and accounting for individuals and specific choices. In this comparison of thefamily narratives in 1940, both elements of individual contingency and structural enabling emerge. On the individual side we note: Mme Hoffmann’s decision to leave Paris in June 1940, and that of my family at the same moment;
Mme Hoffmann’s decision to leave Nice in 1943, when Great Uncle Boris did
not; Vice Consul Bingham’s willingness to sign visas in Marseilles of 1940,
when most of his counterparts did not; the schoolteacher in Nice who forgedsome papers for the Hoffmanns to take on the train; Hoffmann’s friend in Nice
being rounded up, but not him; various people in Nice and Lamalou-les-Bains
who protected the Hoffmanns; the border guard at Port Bou who let my family through without quite the right papers. Survivors have better luck, pureand simple, a theme familiar to readers of such narratives. At a certain point,
there is no grand structure, but simple good fortune.
At the same time the stories show some themes about support that go
beyond the individual and accident. The Socialist labor international network
certainly aided my family. The German, French, and American labor movements accepted the Mensheviks as a vital element, worth protecting, given
some work and status. Internally, the Mensheviks banded together, helping
each other as refugees, whatever their political quarrels. Grandpa Peter needed
an eye operation he could not afford and the group raised money for it. They
had cultural capital, so education sustained them as refugees, with each flight.
These experiences shaped them intellectually and culturally. My parents
were older than Hoffmann, not so influenced by France, though admiring of
its schooling and culture, and they shared his admiration for American things;
they enjoyed America’s social openness especially, welcoming refugees, an easeof social acceptance they did not find in Europe.
For Hoffmann we see no formal structural counterpart to the labor network. We can nonetheless infer something from the French educational systemand the culture it promoted among its members. In sharply divided France, thestate school was notably on the Republican side, advocating its values. Teachers certainly absorbed French attitudes toward metèques, juifs, foreigners, butthey also absorbed the egalitarian ideals of the Revolution, the carrière ouverte
aux talents, to become French by mastering its culture. These individuals werepoised to respond positively to Hoffmann’s individual brilliance.
It is not fully clear how his peers or teachers treated the foreign, Jewish
Hoffmann. “When I lived in France, except for my Vichyite or Fascist classmates of the early 1940s, and my lycée classmates of Neuilly in the late 1930s… I had always felt treated as French, particularly by my teachers….”40 His
Jewish mother was anticlerical, and Hoffmann himself did not identify muchwith this part of his background. At the same time, with his uncles fleeing
Vienna and then leaving France he knew he had a Jewish background. They

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16Peter Gourevitch

both knew their vulnerability and certainly made moves to protect themselves. Some teachers drew upon their culture, training, and personalities by
responding to him with warmth and generosity, forging papers, or comforting
him, regardless of their private views, which he thought were in some cases
somewhat anti-Semitic. They covered for this bright pupil. This sustained him
through Vichy, and allowed him to rise afterward, though not into the grands
corps, which he seemed to have wanted, but into the highest reaches of theintellectual establishment.
Most striking to me is how this experience may have shaped Hoffmann’s
intellectual sensibilities, his epistemology, and his aversion to reductionism
and to any grand theoretical explanatory apparatus. Hoffmann writes withgreat eloquence of his attachment to France. The attachment is both abstract
and personal: abstract to the ideas, but borne through the individual carriers
who conveyed these ideas and helped him. At the same time, Hoffmann’s
love of France allowed him to accept that a place he admired could do bad
things, that countries, like people, were complex. In watching “Un villagefrançais,” the French TV series (2009–16) on the German Occupation years, I
wondered what Hoffmann might have thought of it. Hateful fascists on the
Vichy side mingle with sadistic German counterparts; collaborators, who also
help the Resistance; anti-Semites who help Jews; warm-hearted Jews and mean
ones; friendly German occupiers and vicious ones; sympathetic and courageous French, and selfish ones; bigoted Vichy officials and generous ones; andoften people whose behavior oscillates, as they struggle to manage difficultand stressful situations. Hoffmann exceled at observing these complexities,
and at teaching, lecturing, and commenting about them.
Hoffmann’s experiences shaped his values, national attachments, and his
intellectual style. His writings on these years show a depth of appreciation forcontradictions, sympathy for the positions people confront, and the difficultyof making simple judgments. There is no apologia here. Hoffmann notes thebald evil: the Nazis, the camps, the brutality of the SS, and la Milice. But heavoids blanket judgments of France and the French. Defeated, occupied, internally divided, individuals faced many difficult choices. Hoffman’s review of
the Sorrow and Pity is particularly instructive, as he writes with the perspectiveof how France today understands what happened, and how non-French see it.
He compares the moral complexities of the Vichy experience to how Americans might or should reflect on America’s behaviors during the war in Vietnam, (the review is from 1973.) He admires Ophuls as correcting some myths
about the Resistance of a unified bloc of heroic opposition, a myth encouraged
by Gaullists, Resistance heroes, and Communists. Instead, France had a raging
civil war from the 1930s to the 1940s, as some forces saw the Occupation as
payback and resentment for events in the Third Republic (Dreyfus, the Popular Front) and others saw it as fantasy of purification, some who saw thepromise of Revolution and others who wanted national defense against a
hated invader. He admires Ophuls for bursting the bubble of the unitary resis-

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The Origins of the Stanley Hoffmann We Knew

17tance, but worries about omissions, which leave out other truths about thecomplexity of response. Hoffmann notes that Ophuls left France in 1941 withhis parents, his father Max a famous film maker, and returned in 1950. Thus
he notes an overlap with his own story and an omission: Hoffmann lived in
France through the years of collapse and the Occupation while Ophuls had
not, and thus did not intensely experience the Occupation and final release as
Hoffmann did. The last two pages of Hoffmann’s review essay convey a great
deal about his emotions about France: the warmth, the attachment, the bonding, and the human sympathy.
So evocative are Hoffmann’s words, that Jean-Pierre Azéma concludes oneof his noted books on the Vichy period with a citation from it:
In my own memory, the professor, now seventy three years of age [in 1973] and as
energetic as ever, who taught me French history, gave me hope in the blackestdays, dried my tears when my best friend and his mother were deported, made false
papers for my mother and myself so that we could escape from a city infested by
the Gestapo, where the complicity of friends and neighbors could no longer provide sufficient protection—that man obliterates all the bad moments, the humiliations and the terrors. He and his gentle wife were not heroes of the Resistance, but
if there exists such a thing as the average Frenchman, it is that man who represented his people….41

In his review of the now classic book by Michael Marrus and Robert
Paxton, Hoffmann writes,
To be sure, there was little collective heroism in the France of 1940–41. But those
who have never suffered a national catastrophe, including partial occupation,
hunger, cold, the enforced absence of more than a million countrymen as prisoners of war, the collapse of a regime and of national pride—all of which followed themiserable era of the 30’s and the terribly costly and debilitating victory of 1918—
are in no position to cast stones.42

These comments are surely aimed at American audiences, pushing backagainst criticism of France’s collapse of 1940, as well as Gaullist intransigencein the 1960s. Hoffmann’s attachment to France is evident. Yet he did not staythere. He writes about the appeal of the US, the openness of its universities
and its intellectual culture especially. We can speculate about status, the prestige of Harvard, and insecurities about France and Europe as influencing his
decision to lead a bi-national existence. The impact of the 30s and 40s on thecharacter of mind interests me more: the analytic rigors of the French educational system with its philosophical traditions on top of a genetically endowed
brilliance. That we know. To that we might add the mental-emotional
wrestling Hoffmann did when observing contradictory behavior. He saw goodpeople doing questionable things and bad people doing decent things. He saw
the warmhearted teacher with disagreeable political views, neighbors who protected him regardless of what they thought, the terrible difficulty of knowing

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Peter Gourevitch

what was the right course upon defeat, faced with so much political deadlock
and occupation. The appeal of de Gaulle to a fatherless boy cutting throughthe contradictions seems almost too embarrassingly transparent to point out.
These sorts of conflicting experiences do shape a mind, the character ofthought. Hoffmann disliked simple answers, one dimensional explanations,and mechanical reductionism. Politics was about making choices, and people
have options. He was a fox in his stunning ability to dissect complexity yet beclear, without losing a hedgehog’s conviction that there were bad things, people, and behaviors. So long as he made it to a free society, Stanley Hoffmann’s
talents would likely have stood out wherever and whenever his experiences
had been. Still, his unique trajectory surely crafted the distinctive intellectual
temperament we so much admired.

PETER GOUREVITCH is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the
School of Global Policy and Strategy, of which he is the founding Dean, at the
University of California, San Diego. He is author of Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International Economic Crisis (translated into Spanish, Chinese, and Italian); co author with James Shinn of Political Power and Corporate
governance, and former co-editor with David Lake of International Organization. A graduate of Oberlin College, he received his Ph.D from Harvard, where
he was Acting Director of the Center for European Studies in 1972–73 and
1976–77. He received fellowships from Guggenheim, Russell Sage, and theCenter for Advanced Studies. E-mail: pgourevitch@ucsd.edu

Notes* Thanks to Suzanne Berger, Catherine Collomp, Celia Falicov, and Herrick Chapman forcomments on earlier drafts.
1. Stanley Hoffmann, Revue française de science politique 1 (1956): 44–69.
2. Stanley Hoffmann, Journal of Modern History 40 (1968): 375–395.
3. Stanley Hoffman, Introduction, The Sorrow and the Pity: A Film by Marcel Ophuls(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972).
4. Stanley Hoffmann, Decline and Renewal (New York: Viking, 1974), chap. 1, 2, 3, andthe essays on de Gaulle, chap. 7–10.
5. Stanley Hoffmann, “Le trauma de 1940,” La France des années noires, ed. Jean-Pierre
Azéma and François Bérarida (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 131–150.
6. Stanley Hoffmann, “Cinquante ans après, quelques conclusions essentielles,” Esprit
181 (1992): 38–42.
7. Stanley Hoffmann, review of Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France
and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981) in the New York Times, 1 November 1981.
8. Thanks to Edward Steinfeld, Director of the Watson Institute at Brown University,
who lent me the notebook of class notes he kept from the spring term of 1986.
9. See his essay, “A Retrospective on World Politics” and “To Be or Not To Be French,”in Ideas and Ideals: Essays in Honor of Stanley Hoffmann, ed. Linda Miller and Michael

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10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.

24.
25.

26.

27.
28.

29.
30.

19

Joseph Smith (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993). Some of Hoffmann’s movie reviews
can be found in La Caravalle, a journal he co-founded with the Berrys, as the publication of “La Colonie francaise de la Nouvelle Angleterre.” In its twenty-one
issues, Hoffmann and many others wrote essays on France, foreign policy, travel,
food, and other expressions of cultural life. Hoffmann reviewed Mon oncle, Celui qui
doit mourir, Jules et Jim, and Marienbadinage, among other films.
Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York:
Basic Books, 2013).
Hoffmann, “A Retrospective on: World Politics,” in Ideas and Ideals, ed. Miller andSmith, 9.
Hoffmann, “To Be or Not To Be France,” in Ideas and Ideals, ed. Miller and Smith, 25.
André Liebich From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy After 1921 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Yuri, Russian for George, had been Grandfather Garvy’s Party name; Sylvia had
been Grandmother Garvy’s party name.
Memorial: http://scherbina.net/ukazatel.b.htm.
Letters from Boris Ber Gourevitch to relatives in Berlin and Paris, 1924–1936, in mypossession, and Columbia University archives, in Russian and translated in 2015.
Peter A. Garvy, Vospominania Social-democrata (New York: Private, 1945).
Liebich, From the Other Shore, 219, note 10.
Le Populaire, 10 August 1934.
Liebich, From the Other Shore, 253.
Ibid.
Ibid., 254.
See brilliant novel by Leonardo Padura, The Man Who Loved Dogs, trans. Anna
Kushner (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014, original Spanish edition,2009).
In Hoffmann’s class I read for the first time Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat, which he cites
as one of the best things written on the collapse (New York: Norton, 1946, 1968).
Woytinksy may be known to some as the author of the famous WTB plan in 1932,
a demand stimulus plan for Germany, and also author of the US social security law
in 1936. Peter Gourevitch, Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International Economic Crises (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).
Additional signatories were Alexander Kahn, General Manager of Jewish Daily Forward, and Isaiah Minkoff, Executive Secretary of the Jewish Labor Committee. The
original letter is reprinted in the papers of the Jewish Labor Committee that areedited by Arieh Liebowitz and Gail Malmgreen and published as vol. 15 of Archivesof the Holocaust: An International Collection of Selected Documents, ed. Henry Friedlander and Sybil Milton (New York: Garland, 1990–1995), 99–100.
Catherine Collomp, Résister au Nazisme: Le Jewish Labor Committee, New York,
1934–1945 (Paris: CNRS, 2016), 270–271.
Ibid. This valuable study also publishes the lists, found in the JLC archives, of people saved by these visas, on which I found the names of my family and some of
their Socialist friends. See Annexe II, Liste des réfugiés russes, 274–277.
Breckinridge Long, The War Diary of Breckinridge Long: Selections from the Years
1939–1944, ed. Fred L. Israel (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1966).
It so happened that the person who had become my father in law, Albert
Hirschman, was featured in this exhibit, because he had worked with Fry in Marseilles, under the pseudonym Albert Hermand. Hirschman had actually known myfamily a bit through links in Berlin where as a young man he had joined the same
Social Democratic youth group as my parents and Uncle George, in which many of
the Menshevik children participated. On Hirschman’s work with Fry, see Jeremy
Adelman, Wordly Philospher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (Princeton:

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31.
32.

33.
34.
35.

36.
37.
38.
39.

40.
41.

42.

Peter Gourevitch

Princeton University Press, 2015); Varian Fry, Surrender on Demand (Boulder:
Johnson Books, 1997, 1945).
Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013).
Richard Breitman and Allen J. Lichtman, FDR and the Jews (New York: Belknap
Press, 2013); Jay Winik, 1944: FDR and the Year that Changed History (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 2015).
Katznelson, Fear Itself.
Peter Irons, Justice at War (New York: Oxford, 1983).
For the rest of his life, he remained silent about these activities as if almost embarrassed, or endangered, that he had violated the rules. After he died in 1988, Bingham was recognized by Yad Vashem for his work and the US issued a postage stampin his honor.
Yehuda Bauer, American Jewry and the Holocaust: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1939–1945 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981).
Thanks to Professor Pamela Radcliff at the University of California at San Diego for
discussions and readings on these issues.
Serge Klarsfeld, Le Mémorial de la déportation des juifs de France (Paris: Klarsfeld, 1978).
Mary Felstiner, To Paint her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Salomon and the Fichman’s were in the same Wagon
on Convoy 60. Klarsfeld’s father was on Convoy 61.
Hoffmann, in Ideas and Ideals, ed. Miller and Smith, 43.
Jean-Pierre Azema, From Munich to the Liberation (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985), 211–212, citing from Hoffmann, essay on the Sorrow and the Pity in
Decline or Renewal, 60.
Stanley Hoffmann, review of Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France
and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981), in the New York Times, 1 November 1991.