“Dossier 994”. The Neumann family and the Aryanisation of their farming estate in the department of Cher

Résumé 0

The author of this article explores the history of his Romanian Jewish paternal family, who arrived in France in the 1920s and 1930s: his great-grandparents were victims of the Aryanization of their farming estate in the village of Marmagne, in the department of Cher, in 1941. They had joined their eldest son there, who had come to France in 1927 to study medicine and who had himself been living in a village in the south of the department with his wife, Nyura, since 1935. A few months after the Aryanization of their farm, three members of the family were arrested in the village and deported to Auschwitz, where they all perished. Camouflaged under false identities, the members of the Neuman family who survived the Vichyist hunt of the Jews included the author’s grandfather Alexandre, who had joined the Resistance in Lyon. At the time of the Liberation, they did everything in their power to recover their stolen property, confronting the legal guerrilla warfare started by the purchaser of the farm, a wholesale butcher who had become an important element in the Ravitaillement. The story is that of a small, predominantly rural theatre with powerful Parisian outgrowths, featuring bourgeois, notables, and office workers united to eliminate Jewish foreigners from their land.