‘Ninette's War' looks at France and her inhabitants in a time of war and its attendant horrors

TimesLIVE

13-05-2025

Ninette's War: A Jewish story of Survival in 1940s France
John Jay
Profile Books
John Jay met his book's subject — an elderly, titled grande dame — at a charity lunch, and in the course of conversation she began to tell him about her past. In 1939 she was the sheltered, spoilt daughter of a secular, wealthy, Jewish banking family living in Paris. But over the next six years their life was going to change in ways they could not imagine.
Ninette Dreyfus' father considered himself more French than Jewish, but was in for a rude awakening as the latent anti-Semitism of his compatriots, combined with their rapid capitulation to the invading Nazis, meant an escape from the capital to the unoccupied regions further south became their only hope of survival. Many, if not most, French Jews who stayed behind would later be shipped east to the concentration camps.
The family first went to Marseilles, where the Dreyfus parents did their best to protect their daughters — Ninette was the younger — from what was happening. Ballet lessons and golf continued with, in Ninette's case, the normal teenage angst over pimples and potential boyfriends. But the war was moving closer and so the family moved on to Cannes, which was briefly in the hands of the Italians.
But as the Allies began their reconquest of Europe and the Nazis became more determined to ship Jews to the camps, it became imperative to escape further, leaving France by a perilous route.
Plenty of other European Jews had a much worse experience of war than the Dreyfus family, cushioned as they were to some extent by their wealth, though the Nazis took whatever they could get their hands on. But Jay has made extensive use of Ninette's teenage diaries and they paint a fascinating picture of a time of unimaginable horrors that were bubbling just below the surface.
He has also made use of many other sources, so many that the wealth of detail often gets confusing. Large numbers of people are named — friends and relations of the family — and it becomes difficult to keep track of them and their fates. And Jay's use of language is somewhat unusual. He refers to the exodus of Jews and others from Paris early in the war as 'the exode' and those who took part as 'exodians' — words that don't appear in my dictionary, though their meaning is clear.