The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (35 page)

Jeanne and François Golliet, who worked at the bus depot in Thônes, were active in enabling Jews to escape over the border into Switzerland. Among those they helped smuggle across from France were Isidore and Régine Lowenthal, Polish-born Jews who at the beginning of the war had fled to France from their home in Belgium, for whose two children they had provided false papers and new identities. One of the Golliet sons, Pierre, an eyewitness of the Lowenthals’ escape, recalled ‘an enormous lorry’ full of furniture arriving, according to a prearranged plan, at two o’clock one morning. ‘We had to remove the furniture, leave enough space for two people, and replace the furniture. Of course the village was sleeping. At one moment a light came on and we were very anxious, but luckily it soon went off. Mr and Mrs Lowenthal were able to cross the Swiss frontier before daylight. No one suspected my parents. So they hid another elderly Jewish family.’
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Jeannette Maurier (later Madame Brousse), from Annécy, also provided Jews with safe havens and false identity cards, and arranged for them to be smuggled across the border into Switzerland. Several dozen families owed their escape to her.
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Thirty-five years after the end of the war, Madame Brousse recalled the way in which, while working in the administration in the Prefecture in the Haute Savoie, she had been responsible for Jewish refugees expelled from German-annexed Alsace-Lorraine. ‘I was faced with a number of painful, tragic situations. Nothing was organised at the beginning. We had to find individual solutions case by case—quickly. It was so risky. My family and I were faced with impossible problems and we had to think of ideas, subterfuge and ruses to save these refugees. One also had to be alert to Trojan Horses, people who had infiltrated, who could lead to our immediate arrest.’
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Another Frenchwoman, Geneviève Prittet, arranged for Jews to cross from France into Switzerland at St Julien en Genevois. She was helped in this by a Roman Catholic priest, Father Marie-Jean Viollet.
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Another priest, Abbé Simon Gallay, helped by his curate Albert Simond, and by a fellow-priest, Pierre Mopty, hid Jews in and around the French lakeside town of Evian-les-Bains and also arranged for them to be smuggled across the border into Switzerland. The curates of two of the parishes closest to the border, Abbé Marquet at Annemasse and Jean Rosay at Douvaine, gave whatever help they could. Abbé Rosay was later arrested and deported to Germany: he did not return. Also killed by the Germans—he was arrested and shot—was Yves Roussey, one of the
passeurs
who took the refugees to the border.
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Among those whom Abbé Simon Gallay helped cross into Switzerland was Marcus Wajsfeld. He was six years old when he entered Switzerland in 1943, crossing the border with his Polish-born parents, his sisters Anna, Rachel, Lea and Frieda, and the eight-month-old twins Mania and Simon. Thirty-nine years after the family’s escape, Marcus Wajsfeld, then Mordecai Paldiel, was appointed head of the Department of the Righteous at Yad Vashem, and was to spend the next twenty years ensuring that as many rescuers as possible were given recognition.
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IN THE SPRING
of 1941 a hundred Jewish children had found refuge, under the care of the Secours Suisse aux Enfants (Swiss Children’s Aid), at the Château de La Hille, an abandoned, derelict property near the town of Foix, in the Pyrenees. Born in Germany and Austria, the youngsters, aged between four and sixteen, had been sent by their families shortly before the outbreak of war to two separate refugee homes in Brussels. When Germany invaded Belgium in May 1940 they escaped by train to southern France; most of their parents and relatives were later deported either from Germany, or from France and Belgium, and murdered. In France the children lived at first in the barns of a large farm estate at Seyre, near Toulouse. Then they were taken to La Hille.

The director at La Hille was a Swiss national, Roesli Naef, who had earlier been a nurse at Albert Schweitzer’s hospital in Africa. She was helped at La Hille by four other Swiss citizens of the Secours Suisse: Maurice and Eléonore Dubois, Eugen Lyrer and Emma Ott. In the summer of 1941 she was able to arrange, through the American Friends Service Committee—a Quaker organization—for the emigration of twenty of the younger children to the United States. In August 1942, French police, under Nazi orders, arrived at La Hille and arrested forty boys and girls over the age of fifteen. They were imprisoned at Le Vernet internment camp, thirty miles away, with hundreds of Jewish and other ‘undesirable’ foreign citizens.

Roesli Naef was at first unsuccessful in seeking the release of her children from Le Vernet. She then appealed to her superior in Toulouse, Maurice Dubois, who travelled to Vichy and demanded an interview with the Vichy French Minister of the Interior and Chief of Police. After Dubois threatened to close all the Swiss-run camps in France, the Minister agreed to free the forty teenagers, who returned to La Hille; they were the only Le Vernet internees to escape deportation. Some weeks later all the remaining Jewish internees at Le Vernet were loaded onto freight trains and deported to the death camps in the East.

Contrary to the wishes of the Swiss authorities, Roesli Naef then urged all the older La Hille teenagers to scatter and hide, and she assisted their attempts to escape to Spain and Switzerland. Several of the Swiss camp counsellors and teachers working at La Hille helped to smuggle the older children to safety across the Swiss border. A few succeeded only after repeated attempts. Some of these children, however, were caught or turned back by the Swiss, and deported to Auschwitz. Others attempted to flee across the Pyrenees on foot. A number succeeded, but several were betrayed by their paid guide and turned over to the Gestapo.
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Ninety of the children of La Hille survived the war. Ten were caught by the Gestapo and deported to Auschwitz, where only one survived.

Walter H. Reed, one of the youngsters at La Hille, wrote: ‘For these acts’—protecting the Jewish youngsters, obtaining their release from Le Vernet, and enabling many to escape into Switzerland—Roesli Naef ‘was summoned before the chief of the Swiss Legation in Vichy and dismissed from her post at La Hille’.
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One of the teachers who remained at La Hille after Roesli Naef’s dismissal was Anne-Marie Imhof Piguet. She helped twelve children flee illegally across the border into Switzerland in the winter of 1942–3.

Sometimes the work of many heroic rescuers was undone by a single betrayal. On 23 March 1944 sixteen Jewish children, orphans who had been hidden in various safe houses in the village of Voiron for the previous two years, having been refused entry into Switzerland by the Swiss border police, were betrayed by a local villager and handed over to the Gestapo. All sixteen were taken first to Grenoble, then to Drancy, and finally to Auschwitz, where they were murdered.
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Many individual French clergymen and women are to be found among the names of the Righteous. Greta Herensztat was six years old at the outbreak of war in 1939. She had been born in Paris; her parents were immigrants from Poland. After the German invasion of France in May 1940, the family made their way to Nice, in the South of France, in the Unoccupied Zone. For two-and-a-half years, life was relatively free from danger. But in November 1942, after the successful Allied landings in French North Africa, when the Germans occupied the whole of central and southern France, Greta’s parents decided to place her in the safety of a convent that was known to be willing to take in Jewish children. Greta was then eight years old. Her mother told her that they were on their way to see a priest. “‘A priest?” “Yes,” my mother said, “and please do not talk unless he asks a question, and be careful how you answer it. This man, this priest, is going to help us. Just remember that you are Jewish.” Squeezing my hand, she smiled a smile without cheer, a hopeless smile.’

The priest was Monsignor Paul Remond, Archbishop of Nice, who allowed his bishopric to be used for underground activities, and helped hide Jewish children in convents until they could be placed with Christian families.

Greta later recalled her first meeting with Paul Remond: ‘The priest looked at me and spoke in a muffled voice: “You are now Ginette Henry. You were born in Orange and your parents are dead. You are going to stay in a convent until we locate your godparents. Then you will go to live with them as soon as possible. Do you understand? You cannot tell where you were born, and you cannot talk about your parents. Now repeat your name and your birthplace to me.” I probably stood there, speechless, throat constricted with fear. I shook my head; I could not answer. The priest spoke up with urgency: “Talk to me. You must repeat what I told you. I have to be sure that you understand the gravity of the situation. Repeat, please.” Finally, with a trembling voice, I repeated the unthinkable, my new name, my new place of birth. My parents were dead, and I was going to stay with my godparents. Who were those people? I never knew I had godparents. What was a godparent? I was afraid to ask.

‘The priest told me to sit down. Someone was coming to take me to a convent in Nice, actually a cloister, a secluded order, “The Clarisses.” Again the nagging questions, “What was a convent? What was a cloister?” I waited for my new life to commence. A new life? What had happened to my previous life, the only life I knew? Where was my family? I waited silently without crying. My mother had told me not to.’
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Greta’s father, who had been born in Poland, was deported from France to Auschwitz, where he died. Her elder brother, also Polish-born, a member of the French resistance, joined the American army after the Normandy landings and marched into Paris as a liberator.
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In January 1943 a French Carmelite priest in Avon, Lucien-Louis Bunel, better known as Père Jacques of Jesus, hid three Jewish boys in the boarding school where he was headmaster. In the hope of avoiding any embarrassing or dangerous enquiries, which might inadvertently reveal that the boys were Jewish, he confided their true identity to the newly arrived students in the three upper classes, confident they would be mature enough not to betray their three classmates. His confidence was well-founded: not one student betrayed the trust that had been placed in them.

In January 1944, however, a former student of the school who had been arrested after joining the resistance was interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo; he revealed that Père Jacques had helped him to make contact with the resistance. Père Jacques was arrested, and sent to Mauthausen. When the camp was liberated in May 1945, Père Jacques, although desperately malnourished and suffering from tuberculosis, was still alive; but he died twenty-eight days later. The three Jewish students, found by the Gestapo during their raid on the school, were also taken away. They too did not survive.
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Louis Malle’s film
Au Revoir les Enfants
, released in 1987, was made as a tribute to Père Jacques. Many priests and nuns, and Catholic institutions, throughout France, did what they could to save Jews from deportation. In Valence, the convent of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, Le Refuge, took in Lucie Dreyfus, the widow of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, arguably the most famous French Jew of modern times, and a symbol of the need to stand up against injustice.

In the convent Lucie Dreyfus lived under the name Madame Duteil. ‘The experience’, wrote Lorraine Beitler, who has devoted many years to the story of Alfred Dreyfus, ‘was fraught with difficulties. The Mother Superior of La Refuge was the only person aware of “Madame Duteil’s” true identity. One of the women with whom Lucie shared refuge and even meals at the convent—the sister of the local Commissioner on Jewish questions—was outspokenly anti-Semitic and given to tirades against Jews.’ Lucie Dreyfus wrote to one of her granddaughters: ‘It is so tragic. The world has gone insane. All these massacres are perpetrated in the midst of a general indifference.’
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Lucie Dreyfus survived the war. Her granddaughter Madeleine Lévy was murdered in Auschwitz in January 1944, at the age of twenty-five.
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A Jewish couple, Elli and Jan Friedländer, crossed into Switzerland from Novel, but were turned back by the Swiss authorities. Czechoslovak Jews, they had managed while refugees in France to find their son Saul a safe haven with Catholic nuns. On 5 October 1943 the Friedländers were taken by train from the internment camp at Rivesaltes to the deportation centre at Drancy. From the train they threw out a letter, addressed to the director of the Catholic boarding school to whom they had entrusted their son for baptism and for survival. ‘Madame, I am writing you this in the train that is taking us to Germany,’ the letter read. ‘At the last moment, I send you, through a representative of the Quakers, 6,000 francs, a charm bracelet, and, through a lady, a folder with stamps in it. Keep all of this for the little one, and accept, for the last time, our infinite thanks and our warmest wishes for you and your whole family. Don’t abandon the little one! May God repay you and bless you and your whole family. Elli and Jan Friedländer.’
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Jan and Elli Friedländer were deported from Drancy to Auschwitz. Of the thousand deportees in their transport, only four men, and no women, survived. The Friedländers were among those who perished. Their son Saul survived, saved by Catholic nuns.

Rosa Liwarek’s parents were Polish-born. Her father had moved first to Germany—where he served in the German army in the First World War—and then to France. Rosa’s mother died in childbirth, leaving her to the care of her elder sisters. She was eight years old when war broke out. During the war, the concierge of their apartment in Paris would warn them when a round-up was imminent. They would then go for safety to the Italian Andriolo family, who let them stay in their small apartment until the round-up was over. But on 3 September 1943 Rosa’s father was arrested; the French Commissioner of Police who came to arrest him caught sight of Rosa’s sixteen-year-old brother, but instead of taking him away too, with a swift gesture of his hand he warned him to disappear. He was later to find refuge in southern France. Their father was never seen again.