The French Food Co-Op That Fought Nazis With Energy Bars

“In Europe in the 1940s, there were only two ways out: Marseille or Auschwitz,” writes David Rousset, a French author and Holocaust survivor, in the preface to La Filière Marseillaise: Un Chemin Vers la Liberté Sous l’Occupation. Unoccupied Marseille offered safe harbor from Nazi persecution and a potential escape to the United States. So, as Paris fell under German bombs in 1940, the Mediterranean port was bombarded with exiles from across Europe. The influx of artists, intellectuals, Jews, and activists made lodging, work, and food scarce. A group of refugees found all three in the most improbable of places: a clandestine co-op that produced fruit and nut bars.

Nowadays, food bars provide energy or replace meals. But those made by the Cooperative des Croque-Fruits were more than mere nourishment: They were a means of survival. Nutritionally, they fortified the meager food rations. Financially, the bars filled the workers’ wallets with enough francs to live comfortably. Politically, delivery workers carried resistance messages with the bars in a clever act of epicurean espionage. Socially, perhaps the most important ingredient for uprooted exiles, the cooperative created much-needed community and bonhomie. Like Snow White’s seven dwarfs, the members would sing as they worked, “L’alimentation qui réjouit, la friandise qui nourrit!” (“The food that delights us, the confection that nourishes us.”)

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