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Miranda Pollard, Ludivine Broch. Ordinary Workers, Vichy and the Holocaust: French Railwaymen and the Second World War., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 5, December 2018, Pages 1747–1749, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy300
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Extract
Ludivine Broch’s Ordinary Workers, Vichy and the Holocaust is framed by the author’s attack on two dichotomous World War II myths: the myth of French railway workers’ all-out resistance to the German occupation, on the one hand, and the myth that French railways were responsible for the deportation of 76,000 Jews from France and were complicit in the Holocaust, on the other.
The first myth was almost single-handedly created by the brilliant 1945 René Clément film La bataille du rail, which portrayed railway workers sabotaging trains and railway operations to thwart the Nazi war effort in occupied France. These heroic and manly cheminots (railway workers) faced death to help the Allied invasion and represented a courageous response to Nazi tyranny.
The second myth Broch addresses is that the SNCF (French National Railway Company) was a key participant in the Shoah, an essential element in the apparatus of genocide. This narrative was most sharply articulated in several high-profile court cases brought against the SNCF in the 1990s. The excoriating accusations of these court cases were radically amplified by the involvement of the U.S. judicial system and attempts to prohibit SNCF bidding on American state contracts. “In 2000, the French railways were accused of crimes against humanity” in a Brooklyn, New York, court (233). The actions of the SNCF and the French state—by acknowledging complicity in 2010 and providing money for survivors and public educational projects—have ended this particular chapter in the saga of “corporate social responsibility.” As Broch points out, French historians of the Shoah (including Michael Marrus, Henry Rousso, and Annette Wieviorka) have also voiced their support for curtailing the scapegoating of the SNCF and French railway workers.
