Les cheminots français et la question du sauvetage pendant la Shoah

Abstract

Only one French railway worker has been honoured as a Righteous Amongst the Nations for rescuing Jews during the Holocaust. But to what extent can one reduce the history of railwaymen, rescue and the deportations in Vichy France to this single incident? This article reveals the more complicated history of the Jewish but also non-Jewish deportation trains, and how it intersected with the history of the cheminots and of rescue operations between 1940 and 1944. Without aggrandizing the actions of the cheminots themselves, it seeks to rectify simplistic assumptions that cheminots failed to rescue Jews during the Holocaust.