L’affaire Sonia Rozensweig
The year 1933 in France was rank with seamy scandals: les affaires Violette Nozière, Oscar Dufrenne, and Sonia Rozensweig. Each provided rich material for the early 20th century’s forerunner of clickbait, the newspaper fait divers. Each expressed, with caricatural bluntness, a current anxiety. The little jazz parricide Violette revealed the weakening bonds of family. The brutal slaying of Oscar Dufrenne in his own theater’s office by a young man dressed as a sailor took a wavering course through the judicial system, condemnation shifting from the accused, finally acquitted, to the sexual mores of his victim. The final and most turbid of these affairs, one whose small, sad reality was overshadowed by billows of contradictory newsprint, was that of Sonia Rozensweig, a 13-year-old suicide.
The facts appear to have been these:
Mme Rozensweig, a Polish Jewish immigrant and a widow, was mother to five surviving children, of whom three were still at home: Sonia, who had left school and gotten special minor’s working papers as a housekeeper; 12-year-old Pierre (sometimes said to be in hospital at the time of the incident); and 7-year-old Rosman (in some accounts a cousin).
On the afternoon of September 6, Sonia sent Rosman to pick up a pair of shoes from a local cobbler, whose shop shared a door with a small wine shop and bistrot. When she became anxious that he had not returned, she herself went there and had an encounter with the wine shop proprietor, Thiolas by name, which ended in her calling him a pig. Thiolas took her, together with two witnesses to the incident, to a nearby police station, where she was upbraided by the officer in charge and, according to some reports, further threatened by Thiolas with fines, prison, or even deportation.
She returned to her home, where she prepared an afternoon goûter for Rosman and two other children. She wrote a note: “Mama I have gone mad. I am going to throw myself into the Seine!” She left this note and her key with the concierge and made her way to the river, followed by one of the children (Lazare Burstinovitz, the son of her employer) until she told him to go home.
The next morning, September 7, boatmen fished her body from the Seine. It remained in the morgue for some 10 days until her mother identified it.
Some time thereafter, in late September or very early October, an article appeared in Le droit de vivre (The Right to Live), the bimonthly publication of the Ligue internationale contre l’antisémitisme (LICA), founded by the journalist Bernard Lecache. (It originated as the Ligue contre les pogroms and exists today as the Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme.) On the front page, above the fold, were the articles “Our Response to Nuremberg,” “Has M. Daladier Become an Anti-Semite?”, and “Is France Threatened by Fascism Generating Anti-Semitism?”. Below the fold, the dark eyes of a little girl stared unfathomably out, preceded by the headlines:
Where Antisemitism Leads
Sonia Rozencwaig, 13, Suicide
This is not a suicide but a murder
For the first time, a narrative of what prompted Sonia Rozensweig’s “Pig!” appeared in the press:
The cobbler was talking with his neighbor, a wine shop owner of the name of Thiolas, 11, rue Letort. [Rosman] entered the shop, which was so small it held just a counter and two tables. Besides Thiolas, there was his wife and some customers. The little boy, who speaks our language poorly, asked for his shoes. He was laughed at. Thiolas said to the boy:
“Can’t you speak French? Are you a Jew? Show us whether you’re a dirty little Jew!”
The child remained speechless. Then there occurred the ignoble scene: the female Thiolas held the boy, who screamed and struggled, while the wine seller took down his trousers to verify… I invent nothing, many witnesses can confirm these facts. […]
A little boy of 11, Lazare Burstinovitz, son of Sonia’s employer, had followed, from the street, the various episodes of the incident. […]
The Affair Is Not Over
In the Jules-Joffrin and Saint-Ouen police stations, little Lazare explained the reasons for the insult. Were these declarations taken seriously? I know, it was the mother, fated six times to grieve the children of her flesh, who should have filed the complaint! But a woman who doesn’t speak a word of French, who doesn’t know how or where a complaint is filed, cannot defend herself.
As the mother cannot, others will act. The LICA is taking the affair in hand. There are parties who are responsible for this suicide. There are—at least one. And this party, we do not fear to name him publicly.
It is Thiolas, the antisemitic wine shop owner of the rue Letort.
Against him we reserve the recourse of the law.
The front page of the October 5 edition of Paris-soir, one of the most widely circulated newspapers of the period, of which Bernard Lecache was the secretary general, featured the same photograph and a slightly abridged story. (Above the fold, an interview with Goering and an article on Austrian chancellor Dollfuss, recently wounded in an assassination attempt by a 22-year-old Nazi.)
A follow-up article on October 6 includes the following:
M. Thiolas, wine seller, 11, rue Letort, has written to us to protest this version of events. In his letter, he declares his intention to request an investigation by the procureur général [attorney general], which investigation, he says, will establish his innocence.
The merchant further states that he never abused little Rosman and still less took his trousers down.
“The little boy left in tears,” he said, “because we didn’t understand what he was saying.”
The front page, on October 7, announced with accompanying photograph:
The Forces of Law and Order Obliged to Protect the Shop Where the Little Rozensweig Boy Was Abused
Mother of the Girl Suicide Files a Civil Complaint
Crowd Gathers Before the Rue Letort Shop Whose Owner Has Pulled Down the Shutters
Yesterday and the day before, large groups of people stood constantly before the hermetically closed wine shop of the rue Letort and several times police had to intervene.
Indeed, in this working-class neighborhood of the eighteenth arrondissement, the merchant’s behavior is more severely viewed than anywhere else.
This morning and early afternoon, policemen kept watchful guard over Number 11. A colleague of ours who made no secret of his views was arrested and taken to the station with the least possible gentleness.
Which shows that it is easier and less dangerous to manhandle a journalist than the brute responsible for the death of Sonia Rozensweig. […]
This morning, still more witnesses confirmed to me the authenticity of the lamentable scene: the little boy with his trousers pulled down by the wine seller and his wife, in the presence of two customers, two only.
Others heard the little boy’s cries of fright, mingling with the coarse laughter of those who were abusing him.
Others saw the little girl literally dragged by the man to the police station.
Today the widow Rozensweig files a complaint with the Attorney General and opens a civil case with the help of the eminent lawyer Henry Torrès. The International League Against Antisemitism is also filing a case with assistance of counselor Pierre Loewel.
The incident and its aftermath were followed and amplified sympathetically by many other publications. Not so the Action Française, the cranky dowager of France’s rightwing periodicals, founded in reaction to the Dreyfus case:
THE TRUTH ABOUT THE SONIA ROZENSWEIG AFFAIR
M. Bernard Lecache, or rather M. Berké Lekah (aspirate the H) is a Jew.
He has persecution mania.
He is convinced and persuaded that he, his, and his race are being bullied by those not of the chosen people. […]
To demonstrate, no doubt, his gratitude to this country, which welcomed him in 1905 as it has now welcomed Jewish émigrés from Germany, he had [a] widely circulated newspaper launch the Sonia Rosensweig [sic] affair, which he put together out of nothing and which is beginning to inflame public opinion. L’Humanité exploits it and incites its readers to reprisal.
A revolutionary committee has been formed. And every day a humble merchant and his wife are threatened. […]
11, rue Letort, a wine shop like thousands of others in Paris. At the counter, a wholesome young woman, most likely from the French mountains: the Massif Central, Savoie or the Pyrenees. […]
After a few minutes’ hesitation, the young woman began her story.
“What would you, we’ve been dragged through the mud so. It was September 5 or 6, I can’t remember the exact date. A salesman came and was showing his samples to my husband and me. Suddenly my husband, who was behind the counter, saw a little boy in the cobbler’s shop. The cobbler wasn’t in. My husband opened the glass door between our shop and the cobbler’s, approached the little boy, took him by the arm and invited him to leave. The child began to cry.
“A few seconds later, a little girl arrived who began furiously addressing my husband:
“’Dirty pig, you took down my little brother’s trousers to see if he was Jewish!’
“We were stupefied by this accusation. No sooner was it made than a customer arrived in our shop who gave my husband the following advice:
“’She’s accusing you of indecent assault. No one knows where such accusations can lead. Go with her to the police station.’
“After taking his identity papers my husband went with the little girl to rue Lambert, where a police sergeant scolded her.
“We heard nothing more until Saturday evening, when we read Paris-soir, where we saw the accusations made against us.” […]
A visit to 99 rue Championnet, where poor little Sonia lived, was next.
Extraordinary fact: the residents of this house did not accuse M. Thiolas.
“What a business!” one of them said. “But journalists don’t know what they write about. We here knew Sonia. She wasn’t a normal child. She was crazy, as she wrote in the letter she left for her mother.
“We were all sorry for the poor little thing. She wasn’t happy at home. Her brother, the twelve-year-old, was brutal to her. Sometimes he would hit her with bottles. And her mother? No. It’s too dreadful.”
But the speaker suddenly fell silent. He would say no more. We understood. Our peregrinations through the neighborhood confirmed his eloquent reticence.
SHORTLY BEFORE HER SUICIDE, A RESIDENT OF THE HOUSE HAD TAKEN POOR LITTLE SONIA TO THE GRANDES-CARRIERES POLICE STATION TO DECLARE THE ABUSE SHE WAS SUFFERING AT HOME.
A WRITTEN RECORD OF THIS VISIT EXISTS. It is currently in the hands of the judiciary police, who are making an unofficial investigation.
The case is clear.
Let Bernard Lecache turn his attention to the mother of the poor, crazy child.
Yes, there are parents who mistreat their children.
Let us say in conclusion that yesterday evening we explained this affair in detail to a few Israelites of our acquaintance. We noted with pleasure that none of them took the bait held out by Lekah (aspirate the H).
“He’s an agent provocateur. If he were deliberately trying to arouse antisemitism, he wouldn’t do otherwise,” declared one of them, the son of a magistrate who fell at Verdun. “After all, doesn’t he make his living from his semitism?”
But the most stubborn counter-narrative—countering not the Rozensweigs’ story, but the discourse that had formed around it—appeared in L’Auvergnat de Paris.
Auvergnat? Literally, one inhabiting or originating in the Auvergne, a mountainous mining and agricultural region in central France, over the years the realm of Vercingetorix, the last feudal fiefdom to be integrated into French royal territory, and the home of the Vichy regime—as well as the resistant peasant brothers Alexis and Louis Grave interviewed in The Sorrow and the Pity. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, auvergnats were Paris’s largest immigrant population, a tight-knit colony dealing in scrap metal and charcoal, often sold from combination coal and wine shops, spearheading a move into restaurants and bal-musettes.
L'Auvergnat de Paris, founded in 1882 by Louis Bonnet and in circulation until 2009, took up, not the affaire Rozensweig, but the affaire Thiolas, in polemics signed by the 77-year-old Louis Bonnet himself:
M. Lecache addressed to us, last week, the letter below, which we promised our readers to publish and comment upon. To facilitate this double reading we are printing in two juxtaposed columns M. Lecache’s charge and the response of our director.
M. Lecache’s Letter
1. You accuse me of being the instigator of the “campaign” led by Paris-soir against M. Jean Thiolas, suspected of having, by his acts, moved little Sonia Rozensweig to despair. I oppose the most formal denial to this allegation. I am in no way involved in the investigation opened by our evening confrère.
2. Commenting upon the action of LICA, of which I have the honor to be president, you write that “the action of this Ligue and the energy of its president would be more usefully occupied in countries like Germany, for instance, where Jews are harassed, stripped and exiled, than on our own soil where the foreign Israelites who have flocked here for several years, by tens of thousands, receive the widest hospitality without having to bear a blood tax in the form of military service, and without having to contribute to most of the public funds whose benefits and perquisites are nonetheless freely offered them.”
To that I answer that the LICA, an organization of Jews and non-Jews (it includes among its members a good many Auvergnats), is at the head of the international movement against Hitlerism. It did not await your valued advice to act in Germany and beyond.
In France, the LICA, a French organization, combats all manifestations of antisemitism. It is ready to denounce in M. Louis Bonnet, if appropriate, an avowed antisemite, when he accuses foreign Israelites settled among us of all the sins of Israel. Foreign Jews, for the most part, do bear a blood tax. Between 1914 and 1918, thousands of them, enlisting voluntarily in the service of our country, were killed under our flag. Veterans, of whom I am one, who are members of the LICA assure you of that, confirmed by the homages of the governments of the Republic:
3. The LICA and I had no part in organizing the gathering of the rue Duhesme and the meeting of the Club du Faubourg in the Salle Wagram on “The Thiolas Affair.” We in no way inspired them.
4. Questioning my good faith, regarding an interview I gave to an evening paper, you say that I dare “now insinuate that M. Thiolas is an agent of the police and L’Action Française and affirm that the press campaign on the Thiolas affair originated in antisemitic papers.”
Neither the interviewer nor the interviewee wrote or expressed the previous statements and it is your good faith, as it happens, that is in question. Doubly so, for you have the audacity of accuse me “of attacking an honest citizen,” while I merely conveyed to the LICA the pitiable grievances of Mme Rozensweig.
I will not touch your last calumny, that “M. Lecache and his friends were not alone in profiting from the Paris-soir campaign.” Our completely disinterested action costs us time and money. I hope you can say as much.
The rest of your article reduces to the clumsiest and most provocative polemic. We will not fall into the trap you prepare for us. French justice will prevail.
The President:
BERNARD LECACHE
Louis Bonnet’s Response
1. The Paris-soir campaign began October 5, 1933, after the publication in the September-October bulletin of Le Droit de Vivre, official bulletin of the LICA, of an article entitled, “Sonia Rozensweig, 13, committed suicide. This is no suicide, but a murder.” Now, the first article on the incident in the October 5 Paris-soir was simply a repetition of the text appearing in Le Droit de Vivre. The same photograph illustrated both publications, presented differently. M. Lecache is the director of Le Droit de Vivre and the secretary general of Paris-soir. Could anyone believe it pure chance that, of the major papers, only Paris-soir went poking into this unfortunate affair? And if the manipulation had succeeded, would M. Lecache be so modest?
2. The LICA did well not to await my advice to act in Germany. But would it be too much to suggest that this action does not seem to have produced results of which its directors may be proud?
As for the French section of this League, it wouldn’t need to stir up many more affairs of the rue Letort type to raise a wave of antisemitism throughout our country. Is this really the goal he was entrusted to attain? It seems unlikely.
M. Lecache visibly seeks to confuse matters when he speaks of soldiers, volunteers (1) and homages from the governments of the Republic. We have never attacked French or foreign Israelites in L’Auvergnat de Paris, but we have denounced people who have behaved vilely and whom we would have addressed as severely were they Christian or Muslim. One swallow, the proverb says, does not make a summer; we add: a bird like M. Lecache is not the sample to personify the qualities and virtues of the Jewish race.
3. The meeting in the Salle Wagram was indeed organized by the Club du Faubourg, but the two designated orators were L. Pierre Wolff, “eminent” colleague of M. Lecache at Paris-soir, and Counselor Pierre Loevel, lawyer for the LICA, of which M. Lecache is president. Aside from that, the LICA and M. Lecache had nothing to do with the meeting, where no dissenting voice was allowed.
4. Here is the passage I pointed out in the M. Lecache’s interview in the newspaper L’Appel: “The Rozensweig affair is a classic manifestation of antisemitism; …it is impossible not to be struck by the Thiolas-police-Action Française phenomenon. If the child had not killed herself and if we had not revealed her suicide, you may be sure that antisemites would have found another ‘incident’ to crystallize and mobilize their campaign.”
With the failure of the case he rigged up, I repeat, against an honest citizen, M. Lecache slips away. He was merely the recorder of pitiable grievances…
Bravo to the closing statement. We were favored with the themes of loyalty, good faith, and patriotism; disinterested altruism would have been missed.
As for the polemic engaged in by L’Auvergnat de Paris, it was not as clumsy as M. Lecache claims, since it silenced the stinking beasts who screeched or howled for a week above and around the home of our compatriot Thiolas.
Only a few lean jackals still yelp in the distance, sheltering in the columns of obscure newspapers, exhaling the fury and spite they feel in being deprived of the scraps of the despicable feast they counted on.
LOUIS BONNET
(1) On August 3, 1932, about a year ago, in one of the articles he published in La Volonté on his memories of the month of August 1914, M. Lecache wrote the following: “Our souls were adrift. We believed this fresh, joyous war was necessary. We let our friends depart without holding them back, to be killed like rabbits in the copses of the Marne. WE DREAMED OF ENLISTING AND DID NOT ALWAYS HAVE THE LUCK, LIKE ME, TO HAVE A FATHER INTELLIGENT ENOUGH TO REFUSE US THAT PLEASURE.”
It is M. Lecache’s right to think what he wrote in the lines above and it is also his right to express it. Respecting as we do all opinions, like all religions, we can but bow our heads.
But that this same individual, when he believes it useful for a plea in his own interest, evokes the memory of his co-religionaries who volunteered to die under the French flag because they did not have, LIKE HIM, AN INTELLIGENT FATHER, is this not proof that the vilest of souls inhabits his miserable hide?
On February 26, 1934, the judicial investigation into the Rozensweig affair was closed and the case dismissed. No appeal was filed.
by Phoebe Green
I first became aware of the affaire Rozensweig when it was referred to in a review of The Mayor of Hell in the French movie magazine Pour vous (https://thechiseler.org/home/two-new-films). The Bibliothèque nationale de France’s staggeringly comprehensive website, gallica.fr, made it possible to consult contemporary periodicals—finding not the simple explanation I was looking for, but an ever-increasing mystery. A genuine academic study of the media aspects of the case will soon be published in France (https://www.chcsc.uvsq.fr/mme-laura-schmitt) — I can’t wait.
Article sources (translations mine):
Le droit de vivre: https://www.retronews.fr/journal/le-droit-de-vivre/1-septembre-1933/723/2367987/1
Paris-soir: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k7638870k/f1.image ; https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k76388710/f1.image
L’Action française: L'Action française : organe du nationalisme intégral / directeur politique : Henri Vaugeois ; rédacteur en chef : Léon Daudet | 1933-10-15 | Gallica (bnf.fr)
L’Auvergnat de Paris: https://www.retronews.fr/journal/l-auvergnat-de-paris/04-novembre-1933/1677/3122159/2