Napoleon1er
2nd Lieutenant
- Joined
- Oct 11, 2010
- Messages
- 3,085
Entering into a relationship with a person doing evil as a means of survival is of course tragic and does not reflect negatively on the survivor. Of course many after liberation did not see this, or more accurately, they chose to ignore it. Many women became targets of post-liberation violence because they were easy targets; many of those who participated in this targeting were more guilty of collaboration themselves, just not in as visible or explicit a manner. This practice was an effective way for a largely collaborationist populace to defer guilt.
That said, entering into a relationship with someone you know to be doing evil is wrong. Very wrong. "Love" and lust are not excuses to condone unrepentant evil. Even if a majority of the women who met this fate were just trying to survive, many were also real collaborators. Whether or not vengeance, in the form of shame and physical violence, is an acceptable societal response is open for debate, but the motivation behind it is understandable.
Now, the involvement of children complicates things. As Andy notes, those with children often received less violent treatment. No matter the crimes of the parents, the children certainly did not deserve this fate. That said, it is also an open question whether the welfare of a child should mitigate the punishment of those who do wrong. Also note that most male collaborators were simply executed. Past sales seem to indicate people don't shy away from that sort of thing.
Lastly, I want to address the "they had no idea" thing. That is simply not true. The vast majority of people witnessed or knew of people (Jews, Roma, political enemies, dissenters, &c.) being taken away. Concentration camps were not a secret. The conditions in those camps were not hard to guess. Extermination camps were a secret. Extermination squads were a worse-kept secret, although both of these secrets got out, especially in the East. In France, you knew the Germans were doing bad things to civilians. If you were a German soldier in France who had never been to the East, you may have thought this was justified because these civilians were enemies of Germany, or you may have opposed it and just been powerless to do anything, but you knew.
As to honoring the past, I also have complicated feelings about this episode in history. Was it a positive good? No, I don't think vengeance is much of a positive good. You make an interesting point about what happened to Jewish women in camps; that did not elude me when I made my original post. The thing is, it took a lot more than just Germans to deport and murder around 75,000 French Jews. It took a lot more than German soldiers, German police, French police, and French civilian informers. It took a lot of people standing quietly by as their neighbors were taken away. As to the rest of the 330,000 Jews in France before the war, what happened to their possessions when they fled or were forced from their homes? So, what do these sets symbolize to me? These people let their neighbors been taken away and murdered, then they violently humiliated other neighbors who were also victims of the occupation as well as neighbors who more openly support of the occupation. These sets speak to an absence: those who are guiltless. Collect all the sets but these. In my opinion, that neglects the problematic narrative of French resistance.
