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‘There was no time to sleep’: 4 Jews reflect on a year of helping Ukrainians at war
(JTA) — In the months after Russian tanks rolled into her country last February, the music largely stopped for Elizaveta Sherstuk.
The founder of a Jewish choral ensemble called Aviv in her hometown of Sumy, in the northeastern flank of Ukraine, Sherstuk had to put singing aside in favor of her day job and personal mission: delivering aid to Jews in Sumy.
“There was no time to sleep,” Sherstuk recalled to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently. “All my team members worked the same, 24/7.”
A year later, Sherstuk is still hustling as the Sumy director of Hesed, a network of welfare centers serving needy Jews in the former Soviet bloc. But she has also begun teaching music classes again, too — with performances sometimes held in bomb shelters.
Catch up on all of JTA’s Ukraine war coverage from the last year here.
Sherstuk’s story reflects the ways that Russia’s war on Ukraine has affected Jews in Ukraine and beyond. The conflict has killed hundreds of thousands, left even more in peril and fundamentally altered the landscape and population of Ukraine, forcing millions to flee as refugees.
But the war has also mobilized the networks of Jewish aid and welfare groups across Europe, leading to a Jewish organizational response on a massive scale not seen in decades. And Ukrainian Jews who have remained in the country have recalibrated their lives and communities for wartime.
Here are four stories about Jews who stepped in and stepped up to help, and a taste of the on-the-ground situations they found themselves in.
‘I was needed there’
Enrique Ginzburg, second from right, is shown with Ukrainian doctors in Lviv. (Courtesy of Ginzburg)
Since nearly drowning at 23, Dr. Enrique Ginzburg has felt he “had to pay back” for the extra years of life he was granted.
Now 65, the professor of surgery at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine and its trauma division has lent his critical care expertise in Haiti, Argentina, Kurdistan and Iraq, in various emergency situations. But until last year, he had never been to a war zone.
The Cuba native felt drawn to Ukraine because his grandfather is from Kyiv, while his grandmother is from nearby eastern Poland. So early on in the conflict, he called Dr. Aaron Epstein, an old friend and the founder of the nonprofit Global Surgical and Medical Supply Group.
“Get yourself a flak jacket, a helmet, a gas mask and come on over,” Ginzburg said Epstein told him.
He has been to Ukraine twice under the nonprofit’s auspices, last April and July. Ginzburg’s explanation for why he flew across the world to put himself in danger: “I was needed,” he said.
His base was an emergency hospital in Lviv, a city located west enough that it became a major refugee hub. He consulted with front-line Ukrainian physicians, many of them young and inexperienced, and hospital administrators, watching the doctors in action. He also visited patients in hospital wards and helped to treat gunshot wounds and assorted combat injuries.
Ginzburg’s bags were packed with meaningful supplies. Some had been requested by his Ukrainian colleagues for medical use, mostly specialized catheters. But he also brought tefillin, the phylacteries used by Jews in their morning prayers. Ginzburg, who studied in a yeshiva while young but no longer considers himself Orthodox, wrapped them every day while in Ukraine.
Even though Lviv was far from the fighting, he could hear air raid sirens and the explosion of the Russian missiles, sometimes feeling the earth shake. When intelligence reports warned Ginzburg’s medical team of impending missile attacks, they sought refuge in safe houses.
“Today,” he told the Miami Herald last June, “I was calling my life insurance [company] because I have young sons and my wife, so I’m trying to make sure I have good coverage.”
By the end of his trips, Ginzburg lost count of the number of doctors he helped train and the number of patients he saw. “I’m sure it’s hundreds.” He plans to make a third trip sometime this year.
‘This is our new reality’
Karina Sokolowska is the director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s activities in Poland. (Courtesy of the JDC)
As the director of the JDC, or the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, in Poland, Karina Sokolowska has heard countless harrowing stories over the past year. But one sticks out in her memory.
It involved an elderly Ukrainian couple she met at the Poland-Ukraine border in late spring. The husband was in a wheelchair, and Sokolowska helped push him — back towards Ukraine. They had spent three months in a shelter in Poland but eventually “realized we cannot go looking for jobs, we cannot restart our lives. We are too old,” the woman said.
“If they are to die, they’d rather die back home,” Sokolowska said. “It’s a story of hopelessness. They are so vulnerable.”
Last year, about 8 million Ukrainian refugees made their way to Poland, the bordering country that accepted the most refugees. Early on in the conflict, Sokolowska contacted and visited Jewish communities throughout Poland, investigating the availability of places where the soon-to-be-homeless refugees could be housed. She also traveled to some of the border crossings where the Ukrainians entered, to arrange transportation to venues in Poland and to oversee the conditions in which the refugees would begin their new lives.
Later she would help with, among other things: arranging legal advice for the people who arrived with few identification documents; lining up medical care and drugs; finding them short- and long-term housing; connecting them to psychological counseling; providing kosher meals; and even caring for the refugees’ pets (“dogs and cats with no documents”).
According to JDC statistics, the organization “provided essential supplies and care” to 43,000 Jews in Ukraine and “aided 22,000+ people” there with “winter survival needs … more than double the amount served in previous years.” The welfare organization also claimed to provide “life-saving services” to more than 40,000 refugees in Poland, Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and other European locations. It also helped evacuate about 13,000 Jews from Ukraine. (Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen recently said 15,000 Ukrainian Jews in total have immigrated to Israel since the start of the war.)
Karina Sokolowska, JDC director for Poland and Scandinavia sits in her office down the hall from a hotline room, in early March 2022. (Toby Axelrod)
At the height of the refugee flood, Sokolowska said her monthly JDC budget ballooned to more than what she previously spent in an entire year. Her office went from having a few employees to over 20. The amount of sleep she got decreased in tandem; she started taking sleeping pills to get rest when she could.
“This is our new reality” in Poland, she says of the JDC work with Ukrainian refugees. “This is our life now.”
Sokolowska, the granddaughter of Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors, became active in Jewish life during college, when a classmate heard her pronouncing some German words with a Yiddish accent and persuaded her to lead the Polish Union of Jewish Students. As JDC director for Scandinavian countries in addition to Poland, she typically organizes educational conferences and helps Jewish families learn about traditions they had not learned while growing up in the communist era.
Today, her sense of optimism has been ground down.
“Everything changed when war came to Ukraine — there is less hope,” Sokolowska said. “It’s a totally new everything. Every aspect of our life changed. Our hope for this to be over soon is going down, down, down. Nothing will change.”
‘It could [have been] me’
Tom and Darlynn Fellman volunteered in Krakow in October 2022. (Courtesy of Tom Fellman)
Sometime in the late 1890s, Harry Fellman, about 20 years old, left his home in Ukraine. According to family legend, he was a sharpshooter in the Ukrainian army and was about to be sent into active combat. Instead, he emigrated to the United States and settled in Omaha, Nebraska, where he became a peddler.
His grandson Tom Fellman — whose middle name is Harry — doesn’t know all the 120-year-old details, but he knows that he is grateful that Harry Fellman decided to leave Ukraine when he did.
“It could [have been] me, if my grandparents had not left when they did,” said Fellman, a successful real estate developer and philanthropist in Omaha.
In October, at 78 years old, Fellman made the reverse trip across the Atlantic to pitch in to the relief effort. He also wanted to pay what he sees as a debt to the memory of his late grandfather and to help the current generation of Ukrainian Jews.
He and his wife Darlynn served as volunteers for a week at the Krakow Jewish community center, joining hundreds (possibly thousands) of volunteers from overseas who have gone to Poland and the other nations in the region over the last year to participate in humanitarian programs on behalf of the millions of Ukrainian refugees. Fellman worked nine hours a day with a half-dozen fellow foreign volunteers in the basement of the community center, transferring the contents of “big, big” sacks of items like potatoes and sugar into small containers to be distributed to refugees in the building’s first-floor food pantry. His wife spent her time in an art therapy program that was set up for the refugee mothers and children to raise their spirits.
Fellman is “not particularly religious” but supports “anything Jewish.” In 1986, he accompanied a rescue mission plane of Soviet Jews headed to Israel. “It was the most rewarding experience of my life,” he recalled.
Fellman says he plans to return to Poland, in June, for the JCC’s annual fundraising bike ride from Auschwitz to Krakow.
What did his friends think of his septuagenarian volunteer stint? “They thought it was cool,” he said. “But none of them are going too.”
‘Everything was a risk’
Elizaveta Sherstuk runs a branch of Hesed, a network of welfare centers, in Sumy, Ukraine. (Courtesy of Sherstuk)
Sherstuk’s parents would have sent their daughter to a Jewish school in her early years if they had had the option. But Jewish education was not permitted In Sumy during the final years of communist rule in the Soviet republic. Sherstuk was exposed to Jewish life only at home.
Her parents infused her with a Jewish identity, she said, and her grandparents used to talk and sing songs in Yiddish. That inspired Sherstuk’s first career as a singer and a music teacher, during which she founded Aviv and took it on tour throughout the region singing traditional Jewish songs. Later, she became the director of Sumy’s branch of the JDC-funded Hesed network.
Sumy, an industrial city with a population of 300,000 before the war situated only 30 miles from the Russian border, was one of Russia’s first targets. In the days before the pending invasion, Sherstuk stockpiled food, which was certain to become scarce in case of war, and arranged bus transportation to safer parts of the country for hundreds of vulnerable civilians, mostly the elderly and disabled. The bus plan fell through for safety issues.
As the bombing started, it became dangerous for members of the local 1,000-member Jewish community, many of them elderly, to venture outside of their apartments. Sherstuk, working out of a bomb shelter, assisted by a Hesed network of volunteers, coordinated food and medicine deliveries.
The situation grew more dire, and she coordinated the Jewish community’s participation in a brief humanitarian corridor evacuation of vulnerable civilians that the Russians permitted. She communicated with Sumy residents mostly by smartphones provided by the JDC — the Russian attacks had cut the landlines — and accompanied the busloads of Sumy Jews to western Ukraine. Some of them eventually moved on to Israel, Germany, or other nearby countries, she said.
Sherstuk stayed in western Ukraine for a while (“The humanitarian corridors are only for one-way trips,” she noted), moving from place to place, keeping in touch with the Jews of Sumy and waiting for Ukraine’s army to make the trip back safe. But Sumy, like many Ukrainian cities, has come under frequent Russian rocket attack.
“Everything was a risk,” she said. “We were following whatever our hearts told us to do. We had to save people. I was the one who had to do it.”
Last May, Sherstuk was among 12 men and women (and the sole one from the Diaspora) who lit a torch at the start of Israel’s Independence Day in a government ceremony on Mount Herzl. During two weeks in Israel, she spent some time with members of her family, and held a series of meetings with JDC officials, government ministers and donors. “It was not a vacation,” she said.
After going back to Sumy, at the suggestions of her choral group members and fellow Sumy residents, she organized concerts in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ukrainian and Russian — some in person, some in a bomb shelter in the city’s central square, some online. She has now resumed her music classes, too, and it has all boosted morale. “I [teach] all the time,” she said.
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Victory for Mamdani’s candidates prompts Jewish leaders to puzzle over implications
Jewish leaders across the political spectrum nationally were reeling — some in celebration, others suffering through elevated anxiety — after a trio of Congressional candidates endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept their primary contests Tuesday by taking out establishment favorites with track records of supporting Israel.
“We’re disappointed in the losses,” said Halie Soifer, chief of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, who argued that two of the losing incumbents, New York City Reps. Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat, “represent the views of the vast majority of Jewish voters.”
But close observers of the outcomes, which also included the loss of Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso in the contest for an open seat, were struggling to divine the broader meaning of the results.
Did the victories for progressive Brad Lander against Goldman, Claire Valdez against Reynoso and Darializa Avila Chevalier against Espaillat — after all three charged their opponents with enabling genocide by Israel against Palestinians — mark the end for Democratic politicians who hold traditional pro-Israel views?
Or did they represent something more narrow: New York City’s extremely liberal Democratic voting base flexing its muscle, Mamdani’s enduring popularity following his election last November or generalized anger toward a Democratic establishment that has been viewed by many of the party’s voters as too weak against President Donald Trump?
Sophie Ellman-Golan, a spokesperson for Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, a local group that is closely aligned with Mamdani, called Tuesday’s results a “sweeping left victory” but acknowledged it was hard to extrapolate beyond New York City.
“Voters are absolutely not having it for establishment Democrats who refuse to stand up and fight fascism,” Ellman-Golan said .
Some more moderate candidates did score wins outside of New York City. State delegate Adrian Boafo won a crowded race to replace retiring Rep. Steny Hoyer in Maryland with the support of AIPAC and other pro-Israel Democrats.
And even in New York, not every election went to candidates who endorsed Mamdani’s brand of politics. In the Bronx, Rep. Ritchie Torres — one of the Democratic party’s staunchest supporters of Israel — handily defeated Michael Blake, a former state assemblyman who threw his support to Mamdani during the mayoral primary last year but did not obtain Mamdani’s endorsement for Congress. Blake had repeatedly attacked Torres as purportedly beholden to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee but received just 22% of the vote to 72% for Torres.
For state comptroller, incumbent Thomas DiNapoli — who made additional purchases of Israel bonds in the aftermath of Oct. 7 — beat Jewish challenger Drew Warshaw, who promised to divest New York State from Israel Bonds and argued DiNapoli was helping to “finance Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wars.”
State Assemblymember Micah Lasher won the race to succeed Rep. Jerry Nadler, who is retiring after 33 years in the House and served as one of Congress’ leading voices for liberal Jews. In that race, the leading candidates Lasher and Alex Bores both supported Israel.
“I don’t think it is transferable elsewhere in New York or throughout the country,” Soifer said, pointing to the power of the Democratic Socialists of America in the city. “While DSA candidates can win in some places, they cannot win everywhere.”
When it comes to Israel, the DSA’s case against establishment Democrats includes on the premise that funds the U.S. is spending on military aid to Israel should be spent on social programs to benefit working Americans. As Mamdani put it at Avila Chevalier’s primary night party, she ran a campaign that “called for a foreign policy of investing in babies and not bombs.”
With other key races still to be decided — including the U.S. Senate primary in Michigan, where Israel has emerged as a major fault line — there is no sign that Israel is losing its potency in Democratic contests.
That has left some liberal Jews despairing.
Rabbi Jonah Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, released a statement decrying “the false choice between Jewish safety and Palestinian dignity” and condemning politicians who “demonize supporters of Israel, or deny Israel’s right to exist.”
Some observers also sought to draw contrasts between Tuesday’s insurgent victors. Lander, for example, considers himself a liberal Zionist and has close ties to center-left Jewish organizations in New York City. He partnered with Mamdani during the mayoral race, and Mamdani encouraged him to challenge Goldman despite their differences over Israel.
Lander’s support for a two-state solution — meaning the preservation of a Jewish state in Israel, rather than its elimination in favor of a binational country — also earned him an endorsement from J Street and a warm reception from the New York Jewish Agenda, a liberal pro-Israel group that has expressed concern over Mamdani’s policy positions on Israel.
Margo Hughes-Robinson, director of NYJA, said she was celebrating Lander and Lasher’s victories as “wins for friends of the family.”
There was less cheering among Jewish establishment leaders for the victory of Avila Chevalier, who went from helping to lead the pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia University two years ago to likely representing the Congressional district that includes the campus.
Avila Chevalier was perhaps the most outspoken opponent of Israel in Tuesday’s races and has staked out positions to Mamdani’s left on the conflict. Avila Chevalier defended her decision to attend a rally held in Times Square on Oct. 8, 2023, which many Jewish leaders — and some outside the community, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — condemned for condoning Hamas violence. She has also called Zionism “an ideology that is looking to create a political system where one group of people has more standing before the law than another group of people.”
Tuesday’s contest also followed the victory of Janeese Lewis George, another candidate endorsed by the DSA, in the Democratic primary for Washington, D.C. mayor last week.
Ron Halber, chief of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, said he thought the anti-Zionist left’s success would be relatively short-lived but acknowledged that Israel has an image problem and to fix that they needed to “rehabilitate their behavior.”
“People don’t like the product that pro-Israel Democrats are selling,” Halber said.
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Israel’s cheerleaders lost big in the New York primary
To read the news Wednesday morning, the biggest loser in New York’s primary elections wasn’t a candidate in the race. It wasn’t even a person. It was Israel.
Three candidates who support ending or conditioning American military aid to Israel, all backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, won competitive primaries. The New York Times‘ assessment was blunt: “victories by pro-Palestinian Democrats show the party’s shift on Israel.” So was Politico‘s: “pro-Israel politics just took a huge hit in New York.” This very publication proclaimed the establishment of “a new political machine against Israel.”
Even outside those particularly charged races, the Israeli discourse was overwhelming. Micah Lasher, who won a crowded primary election to replace Rep. Jerry Nadler in New York’s 12th District, said during the campaign that he was “exhausted” by the focus on Israel.
Which makes it worth asking: Why did Israel become arguably the most prominent faultline in the Democratic primaries in the first place?
As the United States faces a cadre of alarming domestic issues — including the affordability (or lack thereof) of health insurance premiums, the future of abortion access and rising inflation — why should elections in New York be about Israel?
Foreign policy is an important issue for members of Congress, of course. And it’s not unreasonable that voters would want to know where candidates stand on, say, sending weapons to a country about whose wartime conduct many New Yorkers have grave concerns. But I think a lesson from this, which supporters of Israel may not want to learn, is that pro-Israel alarmism over progressive candidates has helped to boost those same candidates, rather than damage their chances.
In other words: the strategy of trying to write candidates out of viability by declaring them insufficiently supportive of Israel — or by suggesting that their positions on Israel mean they’re antisemitic, and shouldn’t hold elected office — hasn’t just not worked. It’s backfired disastrously, increasing the political salience of Israel in ways that hurt support for Israel in Congress.
Much of this is, I think, a downstream effect of last year’s election of Mamdani, during which hundreds of rabbis signed and circulated a letter declaring Mamdani’s politics — which center pro-Palestinian activism and skepticism about Israel’s existence as a Jewish state — a bridge too far. Mamdani’s campaign didn’t center Israel, at least at the start; it was actually about affordability. But the attention from pro-Israel groups and individuals increased the prominence of Israel in the election, so much so that by the time he won first the Democratic primary and then the general election, his victory was seen as being as much about Israel as much as it was affordability.
The same has become true of his endorsed candidates, too.
It’s not of course, that Israel was only important or prominent in these elections because of pro-Israel groups and individuals. There are political activists across the spectrum, including many in the progressive camp, to whom it is indeed the most important issue on the ballot. The same is true for voters. And multiple candidates, including Darializa Avila Chevalier and former Comptroller Brad Lander, were proactive about making their criticism of Israel a key point of their campaigns.
Still, we’re seeing an inversion of the longstanding norms by which staunch supporters of Israel have drawn a line beyond which someone’s politics on the Middle East make them unelectable. Such charges arguably played a role in Keith Ellison’s 2017 defeat in the race to be chair of the Democratic National Committee. As recently as 2022, the story of Andy Levin’s defeat in Michigan was that he, a J Street-aligned Democrat, had been bested by AIPAC.
For some of this week’s losing candidates and their supporters, that playbook backfired in real time.
Three weeks ago, the group Combat Antisemitism dinged Avila Chevalier for attending, in their words, an “October 8 rally celebrating Hamas massacre.” Avila Chevalier’s opponents made her attendance at that rally a talking point against her, which meant that just as her contest ended up being largely about Israel and antisemitism, her victory over Rep. Adriano Espaillat did, too.
Rep. Dan Goldman accused Lander, who is also Jewish, of using “dangerous antisemitic tropes” in the election. Lander — who said he felt “queasy” in talking about AIPAC, given the reality that there are antisemitic tropes about the group, but still attacked Goldman for his affiliation with them — won in a landslide.
If the Mamdani-backed candidates had lost, it would have been seen as a confirmation that Mamdani was an aberration, and that the old protocol of demanding at least moderate support for Israel from candidates for office in the most Jewish city in the country was still applicable. Instead, their victories seem like confirmation of a new era in Democratic politics when it comes to Israel — potentially not just for New York City, but also for the whole country.
There are good reasons to wonder how widespread that change might be. The AIPAC-affiliated United Democracy Project, for instance, spent $5.7 million on supporting Adrian Boafo in a Maryland House race, albeit by pouring money into races via ads that didn’t focus on Israel. Boafo, who called for closer ties between Israel and the U.S., won his primary.
But when we consider why, exactly, Israel took up so much space in this week’s primary elections, part of the answer has to be that it was in part because strong supporters of Israel wanted it that way. That things have worked out differently than they might have hoped is a lesson not only about Israel and New Yorkers, but about democratic politics: you can force voters to think about something, but you can’t actually force them to think what you want.
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Long after he was murdered by the Nazis, Marc Bloch enters the Panthéon
Yesterday, Paris experienced two record-breaking events. The first was that the city’s temperature hit 104 degrees Fahrenheit, forcing tourist sites like the Eiffel Tower and Louvre to close early. The second occurred at the Panthéon, which remained open to welcome the coffin of Marc Bloch, the first historian to enter this hallowed site.
The event was literally momentous. The massive 18th century structure, dedicated as the Church of Saint Geneviève, was rebranded by French revolutionaries in 1791 as the Panthéon, the monument for those “grands hommes” who devoted their lives to the French Republic. But in a time of relentless racist and antisemitic rhetoric, it was symbolically momentous, as well.
Bloch was born into a French Jewish family that chose to leave Strasbourg for Paris when Germany annexed their native Alsace in 1871. An adolescent during the Dreyfus Affair, Bloch interrupted a promising academic career in 1914, volunteering to serve in World War I. He spent four years in the infantry, then served as an intelligence officer; by war’s end, he had earned two wounds as well as four citations for bravery along with France’s most prestigious medal, the Croix de guerre.
Between the two world wars, Bloch and his friend Lucien Febvre founded Annales d’histoire et économique, a history journal that revolutionized the practice of history, turning away from the focus on great figures and events and towards the mundane and material lives of peoples. Bloch developed the influential, though elusive notion of mentalités: the term he gave to the intellectual and emotional structures that, no less certainly than was the case with material factors, shaped how past generations experienced their world. This theme informed his early book, Les Rois thaumaturges, or The Royal Touch, which examined the relationship between the myth of the king’s healing touch and the powers he was thought to embody.
The persistence of this myth was revealed in the wake of Nazi Germany’s defeat of France in 1940 and the nearly divine prestige bestowed on the nation’s new leader Philippe Pétain. The elderly hero of Verdun led a collaborationist regime whose first order of business was to pass a salvo of antisemitic legislation in late 1940 that stripped French Jews of their legal and civil rights. These laws forced Bloch out of his teaching position at the Sorbonne, despite the fact that, though 54 years old, hobbled by arthritis and father of six children, he insisted on rejoining the army in 1938.
Forced to abandon the family apartment in Paris, along with his library of 5,000 books, Bloch and his wife Simonne settled in the southern “Free Zone.” Stripped of his post, he nevertheless continued to practice the metier of historian. But he turned his critical gaze to the present rather than the past, holding fast to his claim—one as relevant now as then — that “when a widely held opinion is glaringly at odds with the truth, we are bound in honesty, I think, to attack it.”
The result was L’Étrange Défaite, or Strange Defeat, a searing account of how France’s military and political leaders managed to lose this war in a matter of weeks. Written in what Bloch described as a “white heat of rage,” he applied the same approach to these events as he did to those in medieval France, one “concerned with the task of seeking the solid and concrete behind the empty and abstract.” The principal reason for the debacle, he wrote, was that while the German strategists were fighting the present war, their French counterparts were fighting the last one. With poetic insight, Bloch observed that “thoughts of the last war clung to them because they were the thoughts of their youth. Those days long past had all the brilliance of things seen.”
By 1942, Bloch had come to see that, as a French patriot, he was duty-bound, despite his age, to join the Resistance where he assumed code names ranging from the majestic Narbonne to the mundane Monsieur Blanchard. His good fortune lasted nearly two years when, in the late spring of 1944, he was captured in Lyon, then imprisoned and tortured in its notorious prison Mount Luc. On June 16, he was taken in a truck with two dozen other résistants to an empty field outside the city and summarily shot to death. His buried remains were discovered shortly after the war, as was the manuscript for Strange Defeat.
Inevitably and rightfully, Strange Defeat provided much of the script for the evening ceremony at the Panthéon, which somehow managed to be both severe and stylish. Actors read passages from the book while military guards carried Marc and his wife Simonne’s empty caskets . (Bloch’s family did not want his remains to be removed from the cemetery where he is buried, while Simonne’s remains were never found.) Tellingly, when the caskets were set down inside the vast hall of the monument, an army officer recited, according to Bloch’s wishes, the several military citations for bravery he had received.
In his address, given while standing in front of a column which carried Bloch’s epitaph— dilexit veritatem (“He loved the truth”) — President Emmanuel Macron underscored the tragic relevance of the historian’s life to our own era. Referring to recent efforts made by figures on the extreme rightwing to reclaim Bloch as one of their own, Macron warned against “those who declare themselves more French than you…and yet are always the first to sell out France to hostile powers.” (Among the conditions Bloch’s descendants insisted upon was that representatives from the extreme-rightwing National Rally party could not attend the ceremony.)
But the words written by Bloch, in the introduction to Strange Defeat, are the most powerful evocation of who he was and what he represents. “By birth I am a Jew, though not by religion, for I have never professed any creed, whether Hebrew or Christian. I feel neither pride nor shame in my origins. I am, I hope, a sufficiently good historian to know that racial qualities are a myth, and that the whole notion of Race is an absurdity.” “I try never to stress my heredity save when I find myself in the presence of an antisemite.” Bloch concludes, simply and beautifully, “I was born in France. I have drunk of the waters of her culture. I have made her past my own. I breathe freely only in her climate, and I have done my best, with others, to defend her interests.”
In the other book he wrote during this period, The Historian’s Craft, Bloch quotes one of his sons who, when still a child, asked him what historians do. (The good historian, Bloch writes, “is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.”)
As Bloch would have wished, he will always stand as an exemplar of what, in fact, historians do. And in the life he lived and values he died for, Marc Bloch will always stand as a reminder of what true patriots do.
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