Street by Street

This book tells the little-known history of how Parisians took advantage of the persecution of the Jews to improve their own housing in a time of crisis. When people think of Paris and the Holocaust, the images that first come to mind are those of works of art stolen from Jews. Yet the theft of works of art accounted for only a tiny fraction of the dispossession suffered by Jewish families. In Paris, a total of nearly 40,000 apartments inhabited by Jewish families of modest means were completely emptied and their tenants lost their rights to continue renting these apartments. In the aftermath of the war, the French Republic ensured that these benefits became permanent, silencing Jewish claims to their prewar homes. Based on a ten-year investigation and written in a narrative style, this book tells another history of Paris, street by street, as well as an unknown chapter of the history of the Holocaust in Western Europe.