The Nazis could only accomplish what they did, first in Germany and later in all the occupied territories, thanks to a lot of complicity in high-ranking places, and also thanks to the indifference, lack of courage, ignorance, and will not to believe what seemed to be the incredible acts of the Germans.
—André Scheinmann
This assessment by André Scheinmann, pieced together by author Diana Mara Henry, describes his resistance to and survival of the Nazi regime. But the memoir reads almost like a summary of what we’ve learned over the past 15 months rather than exclusively an analysis of the successful elimination of one-third of the world’s Jewish population from 80 years ago.
It used to be difficult to comprehend how the Nazis were so successful. Today—after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, and the subsequent explosion of anti-Semitism around the world but especially on American college campuses—it is much easier to accept. It not only took the evil inclination of the Nazis in their time and Hamas today, but the fellow travelers, the ignorant, the mendacious, and the useful idiots. Both projects could not have succeeded so well without these supporting players.
Indeed, this comparison between the Nazis and Hamas has been repeated like a mantra—as in, October 7 was the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust. But there is a significant problem with this focus on similarities between the two groups. The biggest complication is the fundamental difference between the Nazis and Hamas even as their primary target was the same minority population. In the case of the Nazis, the program to destroy the Jews was the means for saving Western civilization, and they undertook to do so while hiding their methods of mass extermination. Hamas employed similar brutal, deadly means—albeit on a smaller scale, thank heavens, but their ends were quite different. Hamas’s goal is to destroy Western civilization starting with cutting down as many Jews as they could get their hands on, and all while broadcasting the atrocities to as wide an audience as possible.
Scheinmann has a remarkable tale to share, and among other attributes, he correctly identifies another similarity for victims of the Nazis and Hamas, as in this passage about his time in the Natzweiler concentration camp:
While the prisoner’s body was deteriorating under the regime they were made to follow, the SS and the Gestapo were doing their utmost to destroy the prisoner’s soul. … In order to survive, prisoners had to be proud of their past, convinced that what had brought them there was well worth it. They had to believe that victory was theirs.
This belief that you had a history worth preserving, that made you part of something greater than yourself, is one of the key aspects of André’s survival. He was born in Germany to a Jewish family who were strongly anti-Hitler and spoke out publicly against him as early as 1924. By 1933, the Scheinmanns left Germany for France, where André was educated and drafted into the French Army, believing that his adopted country would rise to the occasion against the German foe.
It was not to be. He was separated from his parents and ended up both working for the Vichy collaborators and the German occupying forces, while secretly organizing and leading a large network of informants and spies. And all while his real identity as a German Jew remained hidden.
André became so important to the French resistance and to British intelligence that he was secreted out of France in 1940 to report to his British bosses so they could confirm who he was and his role in the secret network he established. He was then provided with money and other resources to return to France and continue his efforts against the Nazis.
Those plans were upended upon returning to France when his network was betrayed, and he was arrested by the Gestapo. He spent the rest of the war imprisoned first in France, then at Natzweiler, and then Dachau, where he survived by ingenious and creative means. It is even more maddening to learn that André’s troubles were not over after his liberation. “Life in postwar France was not easy for anyone … forgetting the past. For most ex-prisoners this was nearly impossible either because they were too sick, or because they were used to abnormal human relations and unable to submit to normal work discipline.”
Upon returning to Paris in 1945, he did have one very happy change—meeting and marrying his wife Claire Dyment, who had worked in British intelligence during the war. Perhaps they might have stayed on in France if it hadn’t been for another ugly aspect of the postwar period in that country, namely the number of collaborationists and Vichy officials still in positions of power.
When André learned he was likely to be mobilized to serve once again in the French Army, this time shipped all the way to Vietnam, he determined to leave and emigrate to the United States where his sister had been living since before the war.
The book is filled with amazing details about André’s exploits as a creative thinker who uses his understanding of the German mindset against his oppressors. Over and over, throughout his survival story he embodies the virtues of quick thinking, flexibility, and ingenuity. And he holds fast to the conviction that helping others to survive with him is one of the greatest acts of resistance to Nazi tyranny.
André reminds us that Jews have had to be resilient and continue to be so in the face of terrible acts of terror and violence against them. And, just as the Israelis are showing us now, having a cause to live for is one of the necessary paths to victory.
I Am André: German Jew, French Resistance Fighter, British Spy
by Diana Mara Henry
Chiselbury, 368 pp., $28
Abby W. Schachter is a writer living in Pittsburgh.
