Reckoning in France

     Half a century after the United States and her allies liberated France from Nazi rule, the French people may finally be forced to come to grips with their shameful past.
      It was only in 1995 -- and after decades of official silence and denial -- that French President Jaques Chirac acknowledged his country's role in sending Jews to German death camps during the war.
      Now a Paris court has cleared the way for the war crimes trial of Maurice Papon, who served as a police official in the pro-Nazi Vichy regime and as France's budget minister in the 1970s. Mr. Papon stands accused of expediting the deportation of 1,560 people to the Auschwitiz death camp between 1942 and 1944.
      Vichy was the puppet state created out of Southern France after the French armed forces rolled over and played dead, allowing Hitler to usurp the rest of the country in 1940.
      The people of Vichy adored its pro-Nazi ruler, Marshal Petain, who emerged as the most popular French leader since Napoleon. Writes historian Paul Johnson of Petain's reign: "He was treated like royalty. Peasants lined the rails along which his train passed. Women held out their babies for him to touch." Indeed, French Catholic Cardinal Gerlier proclaimed: "France is Petain, and Petain is France."
      Under Petain's Vichy government, France became the most dangerous place in western Europe for Jews. (Ironically, fascist Italy was probably the safest place for Jews because the Italian people -- while aligned with Nazi Germany -- largely ignored German orders to round up and deport their Jewish countrymen.)
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