Some time later, on February 14, 1944, both adult Finalys were arrested, he in the streets of Grenoble, she at home. Those who fell into the hands of the Germans met the same terrible fate as the adults-in some cases even sooner, being poisoned or given fatal injections by Nazi orderlies.Īs a precaution, the Finalys placed their two babies in the Catholic nursery of Saint Vincent de Paul, in a village near Grenoble. The Jews were the first to be rounded up, and had little chance of escape. In January 1944 German police action was intensified, particularly in the southeast of France, where every suspect person was arrested. Jewish men, women, and children were deported to camps in Poland. Until that time the Free Zone, in which Grenoble was located, had, in spite of Vichy’s racial laws, provided a relatively safe refuge for Jews. Finaly had both babies circumcised.Īs we know, the Germans occupied the whole of France in November 1942. The couple lived modestly in La Tronche, a suburb of Grenoble, where two children were born to them during the war: Robert Michael on April 14, 1941, and Gerald Pierre on July 3, 1942. Finaly, as a foreigner, was not allowed to practice in France. Though he had been the head of a clinic in Vienna, Dr. He was at that time thirty-three years old his wife twenty-nine. Fritz Finaly and his wife Annie ( née Schwartz) had found refuge in Grenoble in southeastern France. Who were these two children who became the stakes in a strange struggle that has pitted a sadly tried Jewish family against a woman some regard as a saint and others as a lunatic Princes of the Church against the Grand Rabbi of France Jesuit fathers, nuns, and members of the lower clergy against politicians and French Catholicism in general against that section of the nation which invokes the Rights of Man and the laws of the Republic?įleeing Austria in 1939, Dr. The French term, “ affaire”- one not employed indiscriminately in common newspaper usage-in a few days replaced the specific term “kidnapping” in the newspapers, in private conversations, and in public debate. The kidnapping of the two children, as a common law crime, was a matter for the Court of Assizes, but the unusual implications of this particular case of kidnapping rapidly began to overshadow the crime itself. The next day, the news reaching the French public, the “Finaly Case” was born. on February 3, Robert and Gerald had disappeared. Rosner, aunt and legal guardian of the two boys, presented himself at the college at 8 a.m. Forty-eight hours earlier, the district attorney of Bayonne had been informed of their secret presence at the college, and Father Silhouette, the director, had been told to hold the children for the authorities. Goldbloom.īetween seven and eight o’clock on the morning of February 3, 1953, Robert Finaly, aged eleven, and his brother Gerald, aged ten, were carried out by unknown persons from the College of Saint Louis de Gonzague at Bayonne in southern France. The translation from the French is by Maurice J. Nicolas Baudy, editor of Evidences published in Paris by the American Jewish Committee, here gives these facts, and throws needed light on the issues. In the opinion of responsible people, however, too large a part of the feeling on one side derives from a plain ignorance of the facts, which is reflected in even the most enlightened organs of Catholic opinion both in Europe and the United States. Public opinion in France, and elsewhere too, has divided into pro and contra, and much along the same lines as in the Dreyfus days. Not since the Dreyfus case has an issue affecting Jews stirred France as has the Finaly “Affaire ,” which, after incubating for eight years, burst suddenly upon the world with the disappearance of two little Jewish boys in the southwestern corner of France this past winter.
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