Michael Rosen has published a new children’s book One Day—A True Story of Courage and Survival in the Holocaust. He spoke to Judy Cox about untold stories of resistance to the Nazis and why they matter so much today
Michael Rosen
Judy Cox
Saturday 15 February 2025
Saturday 15 February 2025
SOCIALIST WORKER Issue
SW: The book tells the story of Eugene and his father Oscar, Jewish members of the French Resistance. This is an inspiring story—why are stories like these not better known?
There were thousands of acts of resistance and not enough is known about them. There were groups of Jewish partisans who fled to the forests in Belarus and other places.
When people tell the history of the Holocaust, they rightly want to emphasise how awful it was. This means that acts of resistance are either unknowingly or knowingly left out and powerful stories got lost.
Lots of those who resisted were ordinary people. They did not write the hugely important Holocaust memoirs, like that by Primo Levi. After the war, many people from the resistance found it hard to be heard and to get published.
There were cells of Communists in Nazi Germany who were active throughout the war. They carried out acts of sabotage wherever possible.
We are told that Nazi Germany fell because of the pounding by the military forces of Russia and the United States.
But ordinary people had carried on fighting on the ground against the Nazis and against collaborators. This was very important because the Nazis did not just rely on their war machine and on terror—they relied on the collaborators who enabled them.
This was true in countries across Europe. And it was true of Britain. The Holocaust Memorial Day happens every year—they never mention the Channel Islands. In the Channel Islands, it was British bobbies who enabled deportations and concentration camps.
Michael Rosen’s new book
I recently debated with Ian Austin—a former Labour MP who is now in the house of Lords. People like Austin want to portray the British as the noble ones, who stood alone after the Nazi invasion of Poland.
But Britain was never alone. Britain relied on its Empire, on all the men and women who made huge sacrifices to help Britain win the Second World War.
I don’t want to belittle the sacrifices made by ordinary people during the war—but we have to raise difficult questions.
SW: How did the resistance operate in such difficult conditions?
There were many collaborators who enabled the Nazis. But there were thousands of ordinary people who chose a different path. In France people hid Jews in forests and caves—these were acts of courage and resistance.
In 1939, people in France were getting ready to oppose the Nazis. Then the Communists were told to stand down because Stalin signed the non-aggression pact with Hitler.
Partisans shot at Nazi tanks and they tried to ambush Nazi regiments.
Georges Guingouin was committed to the French Communist Party, but knew the call to stop preparing for the resistance was wrong. So he had to fight on two fronts—against the Communist Party and against the Nazis.
He led the resistance to the Nazis in Limousin. His partisans pulled off the only bloodless surrender of Nazis in Europe. His group surrounded them and they surrendered.
He was elected mayor of Limoges after the war, but the French Communist Party never forgave him—they actually persecuted him.
They apologised when he was in his 90s and he told them, “I am serene”—meaning he did not bear a grudge, but neither did he forgive.
SW: How difficult is it to recover the stories of resistance?
Researching the stories of the partisan groups is difficult because they were alliances of communists, non-communists, socialists and anarchists and they gave themselves names like the “sharpshooters”.
There is also an attempt to diminish the resistance—to call them hooligans, brigands and bandits. And there is a chauvinistic mockery from the Brits who like to say the French just surrendered without a fight.
There were villages who got the message that they needed to block the Nazis. People got out their old carbines from World War One which they kept because they thought there might be a revolutionary call to arms one day.
They shot at Nazi tanks and they tried to ambush Nazi regiments. And the Nazis punished them at places like Oradour-sur-Glane where the Waffen SS murdered hundreds of villagers.
I have met French resisters and commemorated their actions and heard their stories. Similar acts of resistance happened in Poland and across Nazi-occupied Europe.
SW: In the book, Oscar is sheltered by a French family who were not members of the resistance—just ordinary people. Could you say more about this part?
Imagine the courage it took to lie to SS officers to protect an injured stranger.
In the book Eugene, Oscar and the others jump from a train. They were on Convoy 62. Convoys, that is trains carrying around 1,200 people each, had already gone through.
By 1943, there were rumours about what was happening in the camps, about shootings and massacres. People talked about “Pitchipoi”—an absurd word for the place people went and did not come back from.
There were different layers of deportation. The Nazis in France were rounding up Jews for deportation. Some 77,000 were send to death camps and only about 2,000 survived.
They were also arresting communists and resistance fighters, sending them to Dachau and Sachsenhausen which were not death camps.
When people commemorate the Holocaust, they rarely mention the “I” word. But imperialism drove the forced labour, slavery and genocide
One resistance fighter I knew survived the war in Dachau because the Nazis never discovered he was Jewish.
Some 250,000 French workers were deported to work as slave labour in German factories and farms. That was the brainchild of a French politician, Pierre Laval, the arch collaborator.
SW: Is it true you only found out about Eugene’s story because you were researching your own family history?
My father’s uncle and his wife were on Convoy 62. They had escaped from the north of France to Nice, which was under Italian control. Jews were not being deported from there.
But once US president Dwight Eisenhower announced the defeat of Italy, Nazis marched into Nice and deported the Jews they found to Drancy transit camp.
My great-uncle and aunt had been very close to getting away in boats but instead they were deported on Convoy 62. They did not come back.
The man who arrested them was the same Nazi who tortured the prisoners in Drancy for building an escape tunnel in the book. His name was Alois Brunner.
He was Adolf Eichmann’s right-hand man. He escaped after the war and ended up working for the Assad regime in Syria.
Another of my father’s uncles was deported on Convoy 68. He was arrested in a French village by four French gendarmes.
The Nazis, antisemitism and the Holocaust
There is now a park named after him, Martin Rosen Park, and his name is on the town’s war memorial. This is important because sometimes the Jews who were deported were listed on memorials as numbers. Their names are not always recorded. The mayor and council in the village have done this to help combat rising anti-immigrant feeling.
The word “genocide” was invented during the Second World War by a Polish man, Raphael Lemkin.
At the outset I think it referred to both Jewish and non-Jewish Poles. About 1.9 million non-Jewish civilian Poles were killed. Heinrich Himmler thought of Poles in a very similar way as the Nazis thought of Jews—some 3 million Polish Jews were killed.
When people commemorate the Holocaust, they rarely mention the “I” word. But imperialism drove the forced labour, slavery and genocide. Just like the British empire needed slavery, imperialism often needs genocide to take possession of the land and the factories it takes over and controls.
The Jewish Holocaust, the enslavement of workers—we have to tell all these stories. They show what our ruling order has done and might do again. It is hard for some people to realise that our rulers do not act in our best interests, that they are capable of murdering their own people.
Resistance, solidarity, compassion—these all give us hope. People often say that the allied armies liberated Paris. But Parisians themselves rose up against the Nazis. We should not deny people their agency.
You see the pictures of people lining the streets of Austria giving Nazi salutes to welcome the Nazis. But not everyone was a collaborator, not everyone was submissive. The human spirit isn’t like that.
We have to tell the stories of those who resisted. And be inspired by them.
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