Random raids and deportations began to increase across France in early 1944. On April 6, a Jewish children’s home in Izieu, a tiny village thirty kilometers from Culoz, was raided overnight: fifty-one children and carers who had been living there peacefully, under the protection of the Belley authorities, were deported. No one knew who had ordered or organized the arrests. Years later, a neighbor of Stein’s remembered they had never heard about either the home or the raid, but Stein’s writings make clear her awareness of the peril around her. She never mentioned the Statut des Juifs specifically in her war writings, but she reckoned, in her notebook, with historical and ongoing anti-Semitism, which struck her as “a plunge back into medievalism.” She recalled the horrifying persecutions of the Boer War and the Dreyfus affair, as well as the recent “Jew baiting” in England led by Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts, and wondered whether Germany was not “desperately clinging” to a “strange delusion” of Jewish power. In the same passage, she remembered her shock at Oscar Wilde’s trial, in 1895, when she was twenty-one: “the first thing that made me realize that it could happen, being in prison,” she wrote, implicitly linking her sexuality and her Jewishness, the two aspects of her identity which she knew made her suspect in the eyes of occupying forces. As her notebook progresses, her sense of vulnerability is palpable, as is her admiration of the local Resistance. “We who lived in the midst of you salute you,” she wrote, aligning herself firmly with the community. She knew, by now, that her survival was out of her control: all she could do was carry on writing.
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