On the Road: Jewish Artists in Vichy France

Hundreds of Jewish artists arrived in Paris in the first third of the twentieth century, where most attended art schools and established studios in the left-bank artists’ colony of Montparnasse. Foreign-born Jews residing in Paris were particularly vulnerable after the Germans occupied the city in 1940. In a previous book, I divided Jewish artists between those who survived in France during the war years, those who went into exile, and those who were deported. In this article, I attempt to quantify where artists went in order to survive, including where they found asylum abroad and where they went into hiding in the unoccupied zone. This regional breakdown allowed me to compare survival rates for those in hiding in different regions. I look at three artists in particular: Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Otto Freundlich, and Oser Warszawski, who fled to different areas in the south of France. Of them, one survived and two were deported to their deaths. Warszawski is the least well known of the three, but wrote about his experience before his untimely death at Auschwitz. He created a fictional counterpart who embodied this latest version of the Wandering Jew.