On a Tightrope between Resistance and Collaboration: A Hungarian Jew in Occupied France

Résumé 0

The study of penal archives is one of the avenues that allow us to deepen through a statistical or biographical approach our reflections on Jewish resistance to oppression and ultimately the ambiguities to which it can lead. This paper analyzes the singular case of Dezso Leibovitz , a Hungarian Jew who settled with his family in Paris in 1931. At first an immigrant like any other, Leibovitz volunteered for the French army, was taken prisoner by the Germans, and escaped in July 1940. He survived the first years of the war in hiding in Paris, Lyon, Nice, and Monaco before being hired at the end of 1943 by the Marseille branch of the Todt Organization as an accountant and translator, and later as an interpreter by the German Police in Nice in March 1944. Following the Liberation, as a result of contradictory testimonies, his case was not an easy one for his judges, who finally acquitted him. Was he a collaborator and a traitor to France and to his fellow Jews, or was he a resistant who used his position to help them?