Originally published as "La rafle des notables" by Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2020

The Arrest -- The "Jewish Camp" -- Living and Dying at Compiègne-Royallieu -- Changing Fortunes

"'This story has haunted me since I was a child,' begins Anne Sinclair in a personal journey to find answers about her own life and about her grandfather's, Léonce Schwartz. What her tribute reveals is part memoir, part historical documentation of a lesser known chapter of the Holocaust: the Nazi's mass arrest, in French the word for this is rafle and there is no equivalent in English that captures the horror, on Dec. 12, 1941 of influential Jews--the doctors, professors, artists and others at the upper levels of French society--who were then imprisoned just fifty miles from Paris in the Compiègne-Royallieu concentration camp. Those who did not perish there, were taken by the infamous one-way trains to Auschwitz; except for the few to escape that fate. Léonce Schwartz was among them"--