In the Shadows of Paris: The Nazi Concentration Camp that Dimmed the City of Light

This story has haunted me since I was a child, begins Anne Sinclair in a personal journey to find answers about her own life and about her grandfather’s, Leonce Schwartz. What her tribute reveals is part memoir, part historical documentation of a lesser known chapter of the Holocaust: the Nazi’s mass arrest, in French the word for this is rafle and there is no equivalent in English that captures the horror, on December 12, 1941 of influential Jews-the doctors, professors, artists and others at the upper levels of French society-who were then imprisoned just fifty miles from Paris in the Compiegne-Royallieu concentration camp. Those who did not perish there, were taken by the infamous one-way trains to Auschwitz; except for the few to escape that fate. Leonce Schwartz was among them.