LONDON — On the morning of June 23, 1940, 12-year-old Ninette Dreyfus’s family learned that Hitler had forced France into a humiliating armistice the previous evening.

Her father’s reaction to the news was visceral and physical. Edgar Dreyfus collapsed on the stairs, suffering an asthma attack and struggling to breathe. “I had never seen him show weakness before. For a moment, I feared he was going to die,” Ninette later recalled. “The whole world of my childhood was falling apart.”

But unbeknownst to Ninette, her father, or France’s Jews, much worse was to come.

Released in paperback in the UK on January 22, “Ninette’s War: A Jewish Story of Survival in 1940s France” tells the remarkable wartime odyssey of one of France’s most prominent Jewish families — and the Vichy regime’s knowing complicity in the Nazis’ crimes.

The story has been painstakingly pieced together — like “restoring a mosaic” — by British journalist John Jay, drawing on Ninette’s youthful diary entries, family papers, and interviews she gave to the author in the years before her death in 2021.

As Jay makes clear, Edgar’s reaction to news of the armistice did not reflect a sense of foreboding about the likely fate awaiting his family.

“He was completely dumbfounded that the mighty French army could collapse in the way that it had done,” he tells The Times of Israel. “French Jews at that point had no idea of what subsequently was going to hit them.”

Jay’s book tracks Edgar’s growing sense of disbelief and horror at Vichy’s brutal betrayal of France’s Jews.

The Dreyfus family — second only in influence to the Rothschilds in Parisian Jewish society — were, Jay says, a “classic cosmopolitan, Jewish Western European family, a mixture of Bohemians, Germans and Frenchmen.”

They were also fiercely patriotic and loyal to the French state, which, by and large, had treated French Jewry well. Edgar ran a bank owned by the family firm, La Maison, which had provided loans to help France’s war effort after 1914. A decade later, Edgar acceded to the government’s request to help fight off an inflation-induced run on the franc. He was made an officer of the Légion d’honneur in recognition of his services.

In their grand 16th arrondissement townhouse — which had once been owned by composer Claude Debussy — Ninette, her elder sister Viviane and parents Edgar and Yvonne lived a life of plenty and privilege. The family were secular and, until the outbreak of war, Ninette barely knew what being a Jew was. Occasional antisemitic playground slurs had little meaning for her.

Hitler’s May 1940 blitzkrieg against France changed all that. One month later, with the sound of artillery growing closer and German forces crossing the Seine, the Dreyfus family joined the “exode” — one of the largest movements of people in history — as 6 million people took to the roads to flee the Nazi advance, among them some 100,000 to 200,000 Jews.

After a three-week, 1,700-kilometer (roughly 1,050-mile) journey via Nantes, Bordeaux and Perpignan, Ninette and her family arrived in Marseille, where they took up residence in a hotel full of fellow exodians and Jews.

Already, the poisonous atmosphere caused by France’s defeat and humiliation had sparked a wave of antisemitism. Nonetheless, even as they traveled through Perpignan close to the Spanish border, Edgar, who had ties to the new Francoist regime, did not attempt to flee France.

The Riviera fell under the non-occupied “Free Zone,” which was governed from Vichy by the World War I hero Marshal Philippe Pétain. As Jay details, there was little to suggest Pétain — a onetime supporter of Alfred Dreyfus —........

© The Times of Israel