CBC Radio63%
The Dark Years of Nazi occupation left French people facing impossible choices 10%
By CBC Radio0%
6/9/2026, 3:28:24 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 26 faulty reasoning types, including Framing Effect, Biased Writer Voice, and Appeal to Authority, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 13.6% saturation with 117 hits. Analysis detected 692 faulty-reasoning hits from 859 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 25.4% and a BS Rank of 10% (20,580 of 22,840 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 90.10% of the article peer group.
LISTEN | What resistance looks like when it meets reality:
We hear the word “resistance” a lot these days.
In Nazi-occupied France, a period from 1940 to 1944 known as les années noires — The Dark Years — tore the fabric of French society apart.
People faced difficult, often impossible choices.
Some collaborated, some resisted, while most stood on the sidelines, just trying to survive.
For IDEAS contributor Neil Sandell, who lives in Nice, France, there’s a story from this period that haunts him.
The story was videotaped by France 24.
The storyteller was Rachel Jedinak, who recalled the day that changed her life: July 16, 1942.
She was eight years old.
That morning, police began a two-day operation fanning out across Paris, ultimately rounding up 13,000 Jewish men, women, and children for deportation.
WATCH | The act of resistance that saved Rachel Jedinak from deportation to Nazi death camps:
Among them were Rachel, her older sister, and their mother.
Their first stop was a holding centre.
Rachel remembers her mother telling the two girls to get out through the fire exit.
Rachel says she made a scene, crying and refusing to leave her mother.
"She [her mother] did something that I couldn't talk about before, without crying.
She slapped me, violently.
The only time I had ever been slapped.
Later, I understood.
That slap saved my life," Rachel reveals in the video.
Then Rachel's older sister took her hand and they walked to the door.
But there were two policemen guarding it.
They saw the girls and looked away.
The girls slipped out the door and went out onto the street.
"The two police officers who simply turned their heads.
I consider it an act of resistance," Rachel Jedinak told France 24.
But those same policemen didn’t let their mother escape.
“This clip broke me,” Sandell says in his documentary.
“An old woman reliving the worst day of her life.
An act of resistance that saved two children.
For me, it was a moment of stunning clarity.
The refrain, I was only following orders, laid bare as a pathetic excuse.”
And yet so much remains unclear for Sandell.
Those two policemen were also participants in a monstrous machine, a genocide.
"Why didn’t they let Rachel's mother go as well, instead of sending her off to die?
What moral territory are we in here?"
It's hard not to judge but impossible not to ask, says Sandell.
"What would I have done during The Dark Years?
I don't pretend I would have been a hero."
He says to understand the choices people made then it's necessary to acknowledge what life was like in France.
What resistance actually meant during the occupation.
And maybe means now.
Download the IDEAS podcast to listen to this documentary.
*This episode was produced by Neil Sandell who is based in Nice, France.
Neil Sandell's Recommended Reading List:
Occupation: The Ordeal of France 1940-1944 by Ian Ousby
Paris Under the Occupation is an essay written by Jean-Paul Sartre and translated by Adrian van den Hoven
France Under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise by Philippe Burrin and translated by Janet Lloyd
Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 by Robert O.
Paxton
Resistance: The Underground War in Europe, 1939-1945 by Halik Kochanski
The Marcel Network: How One French Couple Saved 527 Children from the Holocaust by Fred Coleman
Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944: Collaboration, Resistance, and Daily Life in Occupied Paris by Jean Guéhenno and translated by David Ball
Et par le pouvoir d'un mot by Xavier Donzelli
The House Near Paris: An American Woman’s Story of Traffic In Patriots by Drue Tartière and M.R.
Werner
Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power by Timothy W.
Ryback
Coping with Hunger and Shortage under German Occupation in World War II by Tatjana Tonsmeyer and editors Peter Haslinger and Agnes Laba
Histoire de la Résistance : 1940-1945 by Olivier Wieviorka
France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944 by Julian Jackson
The Persecution of French Jews
The Journal of Hélène Berr by Hélène Berr and translated by David Bellos
The English edition includes two important essays.
Mariette Job, Hélène Berr’s niece, adds biographical details about her aunt.
He also tells the story of the provenance of the manuscript.
The English translator, David Bellos, deftly puts the diary into historical context.
Vichy France and the Jews by Michael R.
Marrus and Robert O.
Paxton
L’État contre Les Juifs.
Vichy, les nazis et la persécution antisémite by Laurent Joly
Le savoir des victimes.
Comment on a écrit l’histoire de Vichy et du génocide des juifs de 1945 à nos jours by Laurent Joly
Online Resources
The Centre d’Histoire de la Résistance et de la Déportation (CHRD) in Lyon, France curates an exceptional website.
It’s easy to navigate and full of insight.
Thanks to the ease of online translation it is accessible to non-Francophones.
**Lumni** is a rich online resource for French history.
There you can find the video testimony of Rachel Jedinak whose story features in the documentary.
Madame Jedinak’s testimony can also be found at the Memorial de la Shoah.
Analysis
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