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The 1935 photograph shows Israël and Hélène Malowanczyk standing on the balcony of their second-floor apartment at 118 Avenue Parmentier in Paris’s 11th arrondissement.
The couple – he a hatmaker from Poland, she a French dressmaker – are smiling. Like almost all Parisians at the time, they rented their home, a two-room flat where they lived with their two young daughters.
Five years later, after the Germans occupied France, the fate of the Malowanczyk family echoed that of many Jews in the city. Israël was deported, while Hélène and the girls fled to the southern “free zone” not under direct Nazi control.
When Hélène and her daughters returned to Paris after the city was liberated in August 1944, she found not only had their home been stripped of all its furniture and belongings, but it was occupied by another couple – André Pescheteau, a mechanic, and his dressmaker wife, Yvonne.
Forced to move in with surviving relatives, Hélène learned Israël had died at Auschwitz, among 40,000 Paris Jews to perish in the death camps.
In June 1946 a court declared Hélène could not return to the apartment, where the Pescheteau family remained until 1956.
Now a new book, Homes as Witnesses of the Holocaust, released on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, reveals how the Malowanczyk family were not an isolated case. French authorities refused to allow tens of thousands of Parisian Jews who survived the war to return to their homes.
The book suggests that, far from being sympathetic, the occupants who moved into Jewish homes seemed surprised and often disappointed that the previous tenants had survived and wanted their apartments back.
Sarah Gensburger, a professor at the elite Paris university Sciences Po and co-author of the book, which is based on a 10-year study of previously unseen archive documents, said it examined the city street by street and gives a new perspective on the behaviour of Parisians confronted with the persecution of Jews.
“The received wisdom is that after the Vel d’Hiv roundup and mass arrests of July 1942, Parisians felt solidarity with the Jews. But our research shows this is a simple view,” said Gensburger.
“Initiated by the city administration, for a lot of Parisians, there was an assumption that the Jews would not be coming back. And after the war, a lot of the people living in Jewish homes were quite affronted that the Jewish family had returned.
“These apartments were coveted, and the non-Jewish men and women who had an interest in appropriating them had an interest in the Jewish families disappearing and thought this would be final.”
At the outbreak of the second world war, the estimated 200,000 Jews living in and around Paris were spread across the region and, like most Parisians, rented their homes.Prewar, only7% of city properties were exclusively owner-occupied and rental agreements were passed on through generations of the same family. Tenancies were protected and rents, controlled since 1918, were low.
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When the Nazis arrived in June 1940, they began the systematic arrest and deportation of Jews and seized their properties.
Israël Malowanczyk was arrested in the first roundup of the city’s Jews and deported in June 1942. Three weeks later, Hélène and her daughters – warned of another impending roundup – locked the doors of 118 Avenue Parmentier, leaving almost everything behind except a few clothes and an album of family photographs, before fleeing the city for the free zone in southern France.
The Malowanczyks were one of 25,000 Jewish families who were not allowed to return home, Gensburger said.
French officials argued that non-Jewish families whose homes had been damaged or bombed needed to remain in the apartments they had been allocated. Moving into Jewish homes was, the book says, seen as “normal and widespread behaviour”.
“The letters received, now in the national archives, allow us to see the enthusiasm of the Parisians to profit from the persecution of Jews in order to satisfy their expectations in terms of housing,” the book states.
Gensburger added: “We are talking about ordinary people, who were not collaborators or raging antisemites, but who were encouraged to appropriate these apartments by the politics of the public authorities, who signalled that it was permitted to take the homes of Jews who had left.
“It’s important to understand that these people, the public authorities and the prefecture all agreed that the Jews were not coming back. Everyone was convinced that they were finished. Even when the Jewish tenants were still paying their rent.” Gensburger said that while the spoliation of artworks and other valuables has been recognised and addressed, the loss of homes, has not.
“No one but Jews lost their apartments,” she said. “The book is full of individual stories but its importance is as a collective story, even for the Jewish families themselves, to understand what really happened.
“Today, part of the historiography considers that the state collaborated with the Nazis and antisemitic ideologies but most of the civil population was sympathetic to the Jews. But the population of Paris and around found an interest in the persecution of the Jews and this interest was legitimised, banalised by the authorities who sacrificed a minority for the majority as public policy.”
