Twenty years ago, when he was beginning his doctoral thesis on the General Commissariat for Jewish Questions, the anti-Semitic administration of Vichy, created at the request of the occupier in March 1941, the historian Laurent Joly discovered, in the midst of 9,000 files, the petitions addressed, by the victims of the October 1940 laws on the status of Jews, to the Vichy administration and to the person who was its highest authority, Marshal Pétain.
These hundreds of letters, written by the victims and their families, lead us to the heart of the sufferings endured by the Jews between 1940 and 1944, and of the functioning of a Pétainist regime which, under cover of pseudo-listening, orchestrated implacable manner, without the slightest privilege, the spoliation and assassination of some of its citizens.
This is to say that the task of Jérôme Prieur, the director of Hélène Berr, a young girl in occupied Paris (2013) and My life in Hitler’s Germany (2019), turns out to be complex with The Supplications, both it is a question of escaping the pathos that would be the continuous reading of dozens of letters, handwritten or typewritten, destined to remain a dead letter.
Absurdity of a diet
However, these grievances and requests for derogation recount, as they are read, in this documentary, a story of the persecution of the Jews by the French Republic with the illusions of those who have the hope, sometimes the certainty, of reversing a destiny yet decided in high places. The destitution of the victims, protagonists of a story in which they understand almost nothing.
Individual destiny replaces statistics here. Jérôme Prieur has chosen to follow a dozen victims, whose correspondence with a power deaf to their requests recounts the villainy of a regime and its absurdity, which this documentary restores with exemplary rigor and pedagogy.
It is the letter of a lawyer, supported by the petition of fifteen employees of a clothing store, deploring that the arrest of their boss, Aloïs Stern, on May 14, 1941, during the so-called roundup “greenback”, condemns employees to inevitable unemployment. It is also this word, full of biting, desperate, because expecting nothing more from its addressee, sent by Gaston Lévy to Marshal Pétain: “Our bank accounts and postal checks have been blocked because I have the joy to belong to a religion where Jesus Christ was born. »
Gaston Lévy will get an answer, if not reparation: if he continues such an ironic correspondence, he risks being interned. But Vichy France didn’t need to see clumsy words to murder Jewish citizens, just to offer the illusion of a travesty of justice.