The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (34 page)

The young girl’s parents survived the war in hiding in a cellar in Avignon. Soon after the end of the conflict, Hélène recalled, ‘they came to get us. My mother was horrified at the thought that we were saying Christian prayers and quickly enrolled my brother and me in a Jewish organization. She was, of course, grateful that we had made it alive.’
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NEAR THE HAMLET
of Chavagniac was a château that had belonged to the Marquis de Lafayette, a hero of both the American and French revolutions. Gisele Feldman was among the Jewish children given shelter there. ‘I will always remember these tranquil landscapes,’ she later wrote, and she added: ‘Because of what the “Righteous Gentiles” did for me, because of their ultimate sacrifice, besides mere gratitude, I also feel the need to be the best human being that I can be. I want to be deserving of their sacrifice. I feel that I have to give, to share, to teach love and tolerance. My mission in life is to help make the world a better place in which to live, even in a minute way.’

On a visit to the château a few years ago, Gisele Feldman found out ‘that I had been hiding a few hours away from Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. I found this very exciting, and not surprising. My “Righteous Gentiles”, though Catholics, showed the same high moral values and character as the people of that little Protestant village, just like so many people of Auvergne.’
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GERMAN-BORN
Irene Freund was ten years old when she and her family were sent to Gurs. Two years later she was given shelter in a Catholic convent, where thirteen other Jewish girls were in hiding. ‘I became Irene Fanchet and studied under Sister Theresa. One day, the SS came to our convent looking for hidden German-Jewish children. One of our girls, who was fluent in French, did the talking for us. It worked. The Germans left and we were safe.’
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During 1942 another German-born Jewish girl, Rita Goldstein, then aged fourteen, was placed in hiding under the name of Renée Gordon at a Catholic orphanage in Millau. She was there for only a few months before being sent to a boarding school in Mende (Lozère) in the south of France. In June 1944 Rita developed scarlet fever and was sent to live with Sister Jeanne Françoise in Rhule, near Villefranche-de-Rouergue. She survived the war, as did her brother and mother, who were in a German labour camp; her father was deported to Auschwitz, where he was killed.
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Like so many of those saved by non-Jews, Nadine Fain owed her survival to several rescuers. She was first hidden, at the age of eleven, with her two elder sisters, in the Sainte Marguerite Catholic boarding school in Clermont-Ferrand. They were accepted there with the permission of the Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand, Gabriel Piguet. Their mother survived the war, but their father was deported from Paris to Sobibor, where he was murdered.
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Monsignor Piguet was arrested in his cathedral by German police on 28 May 1944, for helping a priest wanted by the Gestapo, and was held in prison at Clermont-Ferrand until he was deported to Dachau at the beginning of September. When he returned after the war he had lost thirty-five kilogrammes. Broken in body, though not in spirit, he died seven years later, at the age of sixty-five.
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Nadine Fain’s rescuers included Marthe Guillaume, a pharmacist in La Tour d’Auvergne, who took the Fain sisters in during the Easter holiday of 1943; Mother Marie-Angélique Murt, the Mother Superior of the Sisters of St Joseph, who supervised the hiding of both Jewish and resisters’ children; and Mademoiselle La Farge, directrice of the boarding school. Also honoured were Bishop Piguet and Sister Marthe de la Croix, one of the instructors at Sainte Marguerite.
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The bishop’s acts of rescue were all the more extraordinary, as he had been a political supporter of the ruler of Vichy France, Marshal Pétain. He had refused to allow politics to impinge on morality.
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On 15 September 1942 Perla Lewkowitz and her two-year-old son Michel were deported from the northern French town of Valenciennes to Auschwitz, where they were murdered with almost a thousand other French Jews, of whom 264 were children, on that single deportation train, Transport No. 84. Her two other children, Berthe and Jacques, were not deported: they had already been given a safe home by a French Christian couple, Victor and Josephine Guicherd, on their farm in the village of Dullin. Berthe was seven years old and her brother Jacques was five when they reached Dullin after what the young girl later remembered as ‘a long and difficult journey in the hold of a coal-carrying barge and then by train to Lyons. The second stage was another train journey from Lyons to Lepin le Lac, a tiny rural station, and then a climb by foot up a long steep hill to the village. Victor and Josephine Guicherd looked after us from September 1942 until the end of the war.’
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Under the un-Jewish-sounding surname Leroy, the children were taught in the local school by nuns and monks, and helped around the farm.
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Dullin was only three miles from Izieu, and the French collaborators who had told Klaus Barbie there were Jewish children in hiding at Izieu also told him that Jewish children were hiding in other hamlets in the area, Dullin among them. As a result, immediately after the round-up in the children’s home at Izieu, SS units under Barbie’s command scoured the nearby countryside looking for other Jews in hiding. ‘For five days’, Berthe Lewkowitz’s future husband, David Eppel, reported, ‘while a German armoured personnel carrier patrolled the footpaths and the soldiers knocked on the doors at Dullin—it had, as it has today, some ninety inhabitants—Victor Guicherd concealed Berthe and her brother Jacques in a hollow table of the kind French peasants use to store bread and flour. To meet and talk with these unpretentious farmers, long after it was all over, was truly to understand the meaning of the term “righteous”. No political or religious ideology compelled their actions. So why did they do it? “Why do you ask?” they answered.’

Victor and Josephine Guicherd were, in fact, running their own private resistance movement. Long after the war, sitting at the same table in which he had hidden the children, Victor Guicherd told his secret. There were three other Jews in hiding on his farm. The harvest ‘labourers’ at his table had, in fact, been Jews trying to escape across the mountains into Switzerland.
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In Carcassonne, within sight of the foothills of the Pyrenees, a French Jewish widow, Madeleine Dreyfus, and her three young sons, refugees from Paris, owed their lives to Juliette Bonhomme. One of the three sons, later Professor Amos Dreyfus, who was nine years old in 1942, writes that their rescuer’s husband ‘was a collaborator, out of opportunism, and she was in the resistance. Her underground companions called her fondly Caquet—meaning “chatterbox”—a name which fitted quite well her colourful language and her juicy Gallic humour.’ Her lover, Captain Edmond Ancely, was also a member of the French resistance.

At the beginning of 1944, recalled Professor Amos Dreyfus, ‘Caquet’s morale-lifting activities were not sufficient any more. Jewish friends with whom mother had kept contact were disappearing. The situation worsened every day. Through her underground links with the police, Caquet learned that we were on the list of a forthcoming dispatch of Jews to Auschwitz. That little woman decided that it would not happen, and in fact risked her and her family’s life in order to save us. She actually did not know exactly what Jews were (I suspect that even when she died, more than fifty years later, she still was not sure about that). But to her, such knowledge was irrelevant. Her reasoning was simple: you do not kill people because of their race, religion, colour, etc., whichever they may be. And she was brave enough to act on the basis of her belief.’

An attempt was made to smuggle Madeleine Dreyfus and her three sons into Spain, but the clandestine network was uncovered by the Gestapo, and the escape road to Spain temporarily closed. Among those caught was Captain Ancely’s son, who was sent to a concentration camp, where he died. Not long after the Gestapo success, wrote Professor Dreyfus, a woman from Corsica died in Carcassonne, and, ‘by a strange stroke of luck, this woman had three sons with the same first names as ours, in the same order (names such as Gerard, François and Jean-Louis were extremely common). Somehow, I do not know the exact details, her death was not declared to the authorities, and with a little work by specialists, her identity card was used to transform the Dreyfus family into the Sourbe family, a good Christian family from Bastia, Corsica. We, the children, kept our first names, and mother became Anne-Marie instead of Madeleine.’

When the police came to arrest the Dreyfus family, ‘they found that we had disappeared. At 4.30 in the morning we had left home, boarded a train to Toulouse (the big town fifty-five miles from Carcassonne), and from there, accompanied by Caquet, we were taken in a lorry to the very small and remote village of Vacquiers (about 250 inhabitants in 1944, far from the main road). In Vacquiers we were lodged in the “Castle”, an old big house which once had belonged to the seigneurs of the village and currently belonged to an epileptic landlord. Refugees from everywhere were everywhere; everyone was used to the presence of unknown strangers and our presence was by no means out of the ordinary.’

Living with the Jewish widow and her sons in one part of the castle were ‘a French Catholic colonel with his wife, daughter and son, a young French lieutenant, and a Moslem man, all very nice people, who apparently had their own reasons to hide there.’ At first Juliette Bonhomme visited them, but then stopped coming ‘because it had become too dangerous’. The other part of the castle was occupied by a family of refugees from Lorraine. ‘They had children, with whom we played more or less every day.’ Precautions were essential. ‘We had strict instructions never to undress in the presence of anyone but the people who knew the truth about us, and not to pee in the presence of children. On the other hand, in spite of being allegedly Corsican, we could admit that we had always lived in Paris, since our accent had remained, through the years, unequivocally Parisian.’ At the castle, ‘We were outwardly good Catholics. Every Sunday we went to church. Because mother was known under the name of Anne-Marie, she was asked to decorate the Virgin’s statue on May 15, and did it very nicely. I remember that, one day, one of our neighbours’ children asked her mother (the woman from Lorraine) what Jews were. She answered: “I have never seen one, but I know they are very bad people.” We did not know how to react.’
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RAOUL LAPORTERIE HELPED
to smuggle as many as two hundred Jews across the line from German-occupied to Vichy France. A historian of the Righteous, Peter Hellman, has described him as ‘the most selfless of the Righteous Gentiles whom I came across, in the sense that he willingly helped people he had never seen before and would never see again.’
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Living on the occupied side of the line, and owning a clothing store on the Vichy side, Laporterie had the ideal cover for his rescue activities. ‘Laporterie not only crossed the line daily and was familiar with the guards and their schedules,’ writes the journalist Mary Stewart Krosney, ‘but as mayor of the small village of Bascons, he had access to the obsolete papers of deceased citizens, which he forged into new papers for the refugees. Jews on the run, hearing about Laporterie’s efficient help, came to his clothing store, where the mayor decked them out with new identities as Bascon residents and drove them across the border. He usually waited until the end of guard shifts, when the Germans were impatient to be relieved of their posts and therefore less attentive to their duties. Once across, he sheltered them, at great danger to himself and his family, until it was possible to send them on their way.’
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A Jewish student in Paris, Moussia Erlihmann, owed her life to Daniel Mornet, Professor of Literature, who had already ignored the German laws against Jews by allowing her to study. ‘Of course,’ her husband later wrote, ‘a police raid at the entrance to the Sorbonne was a risk, because a girl with a “Juive” identity card had nothing to do there. Raids were frequent in Paris in May 1942. Among other reasons: the Germans looked for a supply of prisoners to be shot as hostages when the French underground forces killed Germans.’

Thus, her husband recalled, ‘Moussia was arrested while leaving Sorbonne, and put into a dark cellar together with a lot of other unfortunate people. For the warders they no longer had names. Sitting along the wall around the cellar, each held his neighbour’s hand, waiting. They knew when the dawn came because then the warders were taking out at random a number of prisoners. The warders were French, but the order “Fire!” coming through the wall was German.’

Moussia Erlihmann did not know that Professor Mornet was a member of the French resistance, that he had been informed of her fate and that he would act in order to save her. ‘All of a sudden, a warder entered the cellar and asked for Moussia Erlihmann, a name! Her neighbours pressed her hands for courage, and the huge guy—remaining silent—drew her along corridors, through iron gates, up to a small back door; he opened it and pushed Moussia outside. It was night and, unbelievably, she was free!’ Making her way to the Free Zone, beyond direct German control, she reached Marseilles, and on 1 November 1942 she crossed from France into Switzerland, and safety. Five months earlier, her mother had been interned at Drancy, from where she was deported to Auschwitz and murdered.
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Several thousand Jewish children were smuggled across the French border into Switzerland. Two French women, Marinette Guy and Juliette Vidal, helped in this way, starting with three sisters.
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At the children’s home in Chamonix which they headed, these two women saved 250 Jewish children and adults. In the summer of 1943, assisted by several non-Jewish counsellors, they provided recreation and relaxation in a children’s holiday home known as ‘Camp of the Ants’.
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