ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on three discrete experiences of World War II. The first is the experience of the female narrator qua Jew of either imprisonment in Gestapo and political prisons, or of deportation to Auschwitz. The second form of experience is that of Jewish women or girls who escaped imprisonment or deportation but not the anti-Semitic measures imposed by the Vichy regime. The third form of experience is that of Jewish women or girls living in a 'Liberation' France that, reverting to its universalizing Republican tradition, refused to recognize the unique horrors experienced by the Jewish victims of Nazism and of French fascism during WWII. The antinomy of elevation to oracularity and debasement to the synecdochical status of the skeletal hand reflects the dualistic status of the Shoah in modern Jewish history. The first attempt at emphatic emotional effect expresses Christophe's scandalized incredulity that in the Liberation period, anti-Jewish persecution during WWII was almost a taboo subject in France.
