ABSTRACT
As far as I can recall, I’ve always been given to questioning, and most often, I answered my own questions with other questions. Such skepticism spared me the intellectual comfort of self-assurance. There are some questions, however, I broached belatedly: foremost, those concerning the Shoah. When the war broke out, I was seven. I was eight when France was occupied. I became familiar with hunger, cold, and fear during air raids. But no one humiliated me. The laws of the French State did not debar me from society. It just happened that—by birth—I had “inherited” Catholic parents and grandparents. It is probably because at that time I hadn’t made the effort to understand what it meant for a child to be singled out as a Jew by the public administration that I am now trying to make up for my past indifference and that I shall always have a certain feeling of guilt.
