The photograph on the cover of a new book just published in France shows a contented-looking couple, Israël and Hélène Malowanczyk, standing close together on the balcony of their apartment on Avenue Parmentier, in Paris’s 11th Arrondissement. Lit by the sun, they gaze down upon the city below.
Israël was Polish; Hélène, French. Both were Jewish. Tango aficionados, they’d met at a dance competition in the city’s Bois de Vincennes. By 1935, when the photo was taken, they’d been married for five years and had two daughters. (Like the vast majority of Parisians at the time, the couple rented their home.)
After the German occupation of Paris in 1940, Israël registered their apartment as one of the city’s “locaux Israelites” (Jewish locations), as a new law required. Two years later, he was deported. His wife and daughters fled south, leaving their home and most of their belongings behind. They remained in hiding in Cantal, then part of unoccupied France, for the duration of the war.
“The Germans organized the Aryanization of France,” as Sarah Gensburger, a sociology professor at SciencePo Paris, who co-authored Witness Apartments: The Appropriation of Properties from Jewish Renters in Paris 1940-46, puts it. (The book has not yet been translated into English.) But the French fell in line. Of the 200,000 Jews living in the Département de la Seine before 1940, 40,000 were killed, most of them at Auschwitz.
After the Liberation of Paris, in August 1944, Hélène and her daughters returned to the city; they eventually learned that Israël had died in Auschwitz. By then, the Avenue Parmentier apartment had been taken over by another family; the Malowanczyk’s possessions were gone, likely shipped to Germany. Under a new law, Hélène applied for the right to return to the apartment. It was denied.
The apartment’s new tenants apparently benefited from local anti-Jewish ordinances adopted in 1942. There was a housing crisis in Paris at the time, and few apartments were available. The Préfecture de Seine seized the opportunity that came with the persecution of the Jews. People lined up in front of buildings in all Paris neighborhoods. “Reallocating Jewish flats became a new national sport,” as one Paris building owner put it.
After the Germans left, the provisional government allowed the family that took over the Malowanczyk’s apartment to remain.
While these stories have long been common knowledge among Parisians, Witness Apartments offers solid proof of how strictly coordinated this effort was by the French government, demolishing “the long accepted idea … that the occupation of these residences was the result of isolated events.” And some individuals joined in, from apartment residents who turned in their Jewish neighbors, to others who found ways to steal their possessions, even before they were legally appropriated by the state.
About a decade ago, one of Gensburger’s co-authors, Isabelle Backouche, who, like the third co-author, Eric Le Bourhis, is an urban historian, was doing archival work on a different project when she came upon 66 boxes crammed with files, blandly labeled “apartments requisitioned for families in 1942 and 44.”
“I didn’t understand what I was seeing at first,” Backouche told her colleagues as she began sifting through hundreds and hundreds of tiny pages, held together by paper clips, some with nearly illegible annotations in blue ink. But it would soon become clear.
“Reallocating Jewish flats became a new national sport.”
The French government, acting by order of the Germans, was ruthlessly efficient: 25,000 apartments of the 40,000 emptied by the Germans because they were identified as Jewish dwellings were ultimately re-allocated to non-Jewish families. “It was not an isolated act,” Gensburger says. The Malowanczyk family was just one of many.
The process of getting these apartments back to the rightful residents was quietly formalized by two ordinances published in the November 15, 1944, issue of France’s Journal Officiel on the subject of “reintegration of tenants.” Their texts were vague. “It was presented as a public policy,” Gensburger says. “It was very general, universalistic. It was all written as if it had nothing to do with Jews.”
One consistent roadblock—and there were others—was a law that allowed those who moved into purloined apartments to remain if they themselves were sinistrés; that is, victims of war or other catastrophies.
The book names Grospiron as one of the major French moving companies that were “indispensable in the pillaging of many dozens of thousands of apartments.” Many others that also profited from emptying these residences and shipping their contents to Germany are still in business. A call to Grospiron International was not returned.
Penelope Rowlands is the author of the biography A Dash of Daring: Carmel Snow and her Life in Fashion, Art, and Letters and other books. She’s currently based in Paris
