For Hubert Falco “it’s not a question of re-assessing the role of the gendarmerie and the police under the Vichy regime because the historians have already studied this period extensively. The role of the State and of its services in applying evil laws cannot be underestimated. We have chosen to pay tribute to the memory of policemen and gendarmes who did not carry out orders or who attempted to circumvent them by every possible means. They would go and warn Jews about impending roundups and arrests, they hid them and protected them. They acted as true human beings and it is their humanity that we want to set forth as an example.”
“In a totalitarian state, disobedience is an eminent form of resistance. In “Eichmann in Jerusalem”, Hannah Arendt showed that implementing the Holocaust depended on individuals obeying the orders they received. That is why she talks about the “banality of Evil”. At Auschwitz it was absolute Evil which was unleashed. But absolute Evil does not come from nowhere. Sadly, it is born out of a distressing ordinariness, where individuals, each in their own place, carry out their own tasks. By disobeying orders, these policemen and gendarmes that Yad Vashem has recognised as “Righteous among the Nations” opposed this ordinary evil with ordinary good. What is striking in all the testimonies collected about these exceptional men, is that they all unanimously declare “It was natural to save Jews.”
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