The Hidden Children of France, 1940-1945

Betty Becker-Theye

Description

The history of France's "hidden children" and of the French citizens who saved six out of seven Jewish children and three-fourths of the Jewish adult population from deportation during the Nazi occupation is little known to American readers. In The Hidden Children of France, Danielle Bailly (a hidden child herself whose family travelled all over rural France before sending her to live with strangers who could protect her) reveals the stories behind the statistics of those who were saved by the extraordinary acts of ordinary people. Eighteen former "hidden children" describe their lives before, during, and after the war, recounting their incredible journeys and expressing their deepest gratitude to those who put themselves at risk to save others.
List of Illustrations
Foreword by Pierre Vidal-Naquet
Introduction by Danielle Bailly

Testimonies of Individuals from Youngest to Oldest

1. Simon Marjenberg
2. Charles Zelwer
3. Noël Kuperman
4. Francis Bailly
5. Arnold Rochfeld
6. Danielle Bailly
7. Danièle Menès
8. Nelly Scharapan
9. Éliane Séravalle
10. Rachel Jedinak
11. Daniel Krakowski
12. Willy Swiczka
13. Édith Moskovic
14. Nicole Eizner
15. Odette Kozuch
16. Gaby Netchine-Grynberg
17. Philippe Fouquey
18. Serge Netchine

Chronology
Glossary
French Acronyms
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Biographical Notes

Sujets

• The Holocaust
• History of Europe
• France

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438431987
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Hidden Children of France, 1940–1945

Stories of Survival
E DITED BY Danielle Bailly
T RANSLATED BY Betty Becker-Theye
F OREWORD BY Pierre Vidal-Naquet

Originally published as Traqués, Cachés, Vivants: Des Enfants juifs en France, 1940–1945 .
Édith Moskovic’s testimony, published in Tsafon, revue d’études juives du Nord 41 (2001), is published in translation here with permission of the editor, Madame Danielle Delmaire.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2010 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Traqués, cachés, vivants. English
The hidden children of France, 1940–1945 : stories of survival / [collected and edited by] Danielle Bailly ; translated by Betty Becker-Theye.
p. cm.
Translation of: Traqués, cachés, vivants. Paris : L’Harmattan, 2004.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3196-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Jewish children—France—Biography. 2. Jewish children in the Holocaust—France—Biography. 3. Holocaust survivors—France—Biography. 4. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—France. I. Bailly, Danielle. II. Title.
DS135.F89T7313 2010
940.53'18092244—dc22
2009051692
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To those who saved us
Our heartfelt thanks go to all those—known and unknown—who put themselves in danger that we might survive: individuals or institutions, rural residents or city dwellers. Those who falsified papers, those who took us in, those who organized networks to help and place the children. All those who resisted the murderous ideology of the Nazi and Pétain regimes. Those who allowed France, of all the occupied countries, proportionately to deport the fewest children and adults. The testimonies given in this book clearly show that some of our families were denounced, arrested, sent to death—not only by the Nazi occupiers but by French—that some of us were not well treated by those who hid us; that many people, more or less Vichy supporters, remained indifferent. These historic facts only magnify the courage of those who took risks to save us. They forever have our gratitude for their magnificent expression of humanity.

Illustrations
1.1 Simon, age four
2.1 “Charlie,” twenty-two months old
3.1 Noël, age one
4.1 Francis, age four
5.1 Arnold, age three and one-half
6.1 Danielle, age five
7.1 Danièle, age five
8.1 Nelly, photograph of a drawing of her by her grandfather
9.1 Éliane, age ten
10.1 Rachel and Louise, ages eight and thirteen
11.1 Daniel, age seven
12.1 Willy, in 1991
13.1 The Moskovic family, with Édith, age three, and Ernest, age one and one-half
14.1 Nicole, age eleven
15.1 Odette, age twelve
16.1 Gaby, age twelve
17.1 Philippe, age seventeen
18.1 Serge, age twelve

Foreword
To the memory of Gérard Brunschwig, my cousin and my friend, 1924–2003
T here are few circumstances in history or in my own personal memory of the years 1940–1945 that touch me as deeply as that of the hidden child, or rather “the hidden children,” simply because my brothers, my sister, and I were, during a brief but critical period of time, “hidden children.” Our situation was extremely serious because it immediately followed the arrest of our parents in Marseille on May 15, 1944, but infinitely more comfortable than those recounted in this book. And as there was no “return” of our parents, there was also no opportunity to grieve, no rites of passage, no condolences. Little by little, our hope faded into an endless wait.
And yet, as we know, despite the Vichy government and its Marshal Pétain, and contrary to what was drummed into us after 1943, three out of four Jews and six out of every seven of their children living in France escaped deportation. As Asher Cohen pointed out in his seminal book, Persécutions et sauvetages , 1 while French society—still stunned by defeat—did not collectively resist the law that created a Jewish apartheid, it did refuse, as best it could, the massive deportation begun in 1942, which spread to the Unoccupied Zone with Laval’s and Bousquet’s delivery of thousands of families of Jewish “foreigners” considered by the Vichy government to be the “dregs of society.” Statements made then by numerous bishops—even if they did not all use the strong tone of His Excellency Monsignor Saliège, Archbishop of Toulouse—marked a change in the attitude of the Catholic Church. The small avant-garde, which in Lyon circulated the Cahiers du témoinage chrétien , 2 was then joined by huge numbers of supporters at the end of 1942. My literature teacher, Léon Auger, an anarchist and extreme anti-Nazi, asked me to help widely disseminate this publication beyond Catholic circles. The solidarity of Protestants—more than one example can be found in this book—was very determined. This explains why, like my childhood friend Philippe Fouquey, I was enrolled, as were most of the boys of my family who were given refuge in Marseille, with the Cub Scouts and later the Boy Scouts of the Protestant movement. For some Protestants this was a matter of solidarity among minorities; for others it was a shared reference to the Old Testament. I found proof of this in two villages where there were numerous Protestants: Saint-Agrève in the Ardèche region and Dieulefit in the Drôme region. For a time, my sister attended junior high at Collège Cévenol in Chambon-sur-Lignon, ten kilometers from Saint-Agrève.
Taking into consideration just the grandchildren of my own grandparents, eighteen in all—ten grandsons, eight granddaughters—only one, my brother Yves, died during the war in the June exodus of 1940, and he not directly at the hands of the Nazis. The other seventeen survived the Occupation as did my two grandmothers. In my parents’ generation—besides my mother and father—my uncle Germain Lang-Verte, husband of my mother’s oldest sister, disappeared at Auschwitz. He had been arrested and turned over to the Germans at the border in the Pyrenees.
My uncle Georges Vidal-Naquet, my father’s brother and husband of my mother’s twin sister Martha, managed to cross the border and get to North Africa, where he reappeared as a captain and medic in the army. His wife and children, along with my maternal grandmother, found refuge in Saint-Agrève, while my father’s sister Isabelle with her mother and three sons settled after the Occupation in the Southern Zone at Dieulefit. The oldest of these boys, Gérard (1924–2003)—the only one of my cousins to be of military age—joined the Resistance at Marseille and by June 1944, had made it to the Resistance fighter group at Belledone, not far from Grenoble. He participated in the liberation of the town of Vizille (one of the Gestapo headquarters) before returning to Paris and, following in the footsteps of his father, Robert (1893–1939), was admitted to the prestigious École Polytechnique. My mother’s older sister, Hermine, who with her two daughters had accompanied General Bloch (called Dassault)—a military adviser to the National Front (i.e., the Communist Party) 3 —also participated in the Resistance in Paris. Félix Valabrègue, my mother’s older brother, got away to Morocco with his wife and two sons while his younger brother Georges and his Russian wife, Véra de Gunzburg, went to America in 1940, where they settled near San Francisco.
All in all, only my parents did not get to Algiers or London or New York or Paris, although my father had several opportunities to do so after being demobilized in 1940. He first joined the Resistance at the end of 1940 with the Musée de l’Homme group, and then the National Front when he was able to join my mother at my maternal grandmother’s home in Marseille. Everyone urged him to leave, but with my mother supporting his decision, he refused to do so out of dignity, even though his sister had a house waiting for us in Dieulefit. It was clearly an irrational, if courageous, decision. My mother showed perhaps even greater courage by giving birth on January 23, 1944, to a fourth son, Claude, who only lived to age twenty. At least my parents had instructed us, in case of emergency, not to rejoin them under any circumstances. My mother encouraged my brother François (born in 1932) to flee. He was not caught. My sister Aline and I were warned by our teachers and classmates, thanks to the cook, Joséphine Marchais. Even the Gestapo agents acted in a contradictory manner by searching for us while letting my baby brother be taken by the neighbors.
My sister Aline (born in 1933), now a retired medical doctor, took refuge with her history teacher, Madame Passelaigue. She never left our baby brother whom she refers to in her diary as her son. They both quickly made it to Saint-Agrève. François spent two nights on rue Saintes with people he never could find again. As for me, I went to the home of my former English teacher, André Bouttes