Operation Yellow Star / Black Thursday

Operation Yellow Star/Black Thursday by Maurice Rajsfus discusses the French reaction to the Nazis’ treatment of Jews in France. The two-books-in-one combines the overall treatment of the Jews after the fall of Paris and their eventual round-up on July 16, 1942.

The author’s first-person accounts are incredibly detailed and heartfelt. He does not sugar-coat the thoughts and feelings of being treated completely differently from one day to the next. Operation Yellow Star covers the Nazi mandate that all Jews wear a yellow star to identify themselves as separate from the rest of the population. The initial explanation for the new law was to “protect” the Jews. Very few people saw it as protection. It allowed the Jewish population to be easily identified and singled out by anti-Semitic Frenchmen and the new Nazi regime.

Black Thursday recounts Rajsfus’s experience of being arrested and sent to what amounted to a ghetto and eventually sent to Auschwitz. Old enough to understand what was going on around him, Rajsfus pulls the reader into his life as an undesirable person.

Well researched and deeply personal, the accounts are powerful in their detail. Unfortunately, the author gets bogged down in the specific details, and it comes off as more of a research book than a first-person account.