France's Acknowledgement

It's always good to know that others seem to care. That you're not really, as it often appears, alone in the world. That your suffering, the bloody carnage that is your history is acknowledged, that it brings shame to others, that they recognize their deficiency in abandoning your people at a time of critical need, that they realize that others met the challenge of humanity in crisis.

Here is France, formally honouring those among their war-time population who honoured their own humanity by aiding and assisting Jews among them - also citizens of France - to escape death. Death because they belonged to a group whose presence on this earth somehow always seemed to encourage a visceral dislike from others. Death because a fascist regime identified Europe's Jewish population as a scourge, a parasitical entity unworthy of life. Therefore destined to mass annihilation.

This is the same France where traditionally anti-Semitism has found fertile ground to display itself. Where its highly-respected latter-day philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre took his countrymen to task over the Dreyfus affair, where during the French Revolution French Jews stood shoulder to shoulder with their compatriots, proud to be welcomed as equals under the flag of fraternity and equality. This was their country, this was their place, this was their time.

This is also current-day France which refuses to admit the growing incidents of anti-Semitism among the population at large, and of through the auspices of their burgeoning Arab-French population in particular. This is the France of today which berates the State of Israel for its intransigently-obsessive need to protect its citizens from the ongoing assaults from its Islamist neighbours determined to complete what fascist Germany began.

And so it is that there is a slight tinge of acridity in the acceptance of latter-day recognition of the place in the annals of the righteous among gentiles where Jacques Chirac, president of France unveiled a plaque to commemorate the more than 2,600 French citizens who took their courage in hand and offered refuge to Jews. All the more so as these staunch heroes revealed their humanity at a time when Vichy France collaborated with its Nazi occupiers.

So vulnerable is the level of esteem in which Jews are held internatonally, that even France with its spotty record of support for the acknowledged equality of Jews within society, can boast the largest number of the "Righteous Among the Nations" recognized and nominated by the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Israel. For with their brave assistance, fully 75% of France's Jews survived World War 2, thanks to these "ordinary" people.

In contrast, roughly 75% of Dutch Jews and as many as 90% of Polish Jews perished during the Holocaust. Poland (that bastion of unforgivingly-growing anti-Semites) and the Netherlands still have reason to celebrate the presence among their populations of social-humanists by character, for they too can boast the presence in their population of life-affirming agents of escape from death for those Jews fortunate enough to have received help for survival.

Contrasting sharply with the bulk of those European populations' civilians who remained silent, and those who found personal salvation in collaborating with the Nazi occupiers, believing no doubt that God would have it so.