My name is Mireille Taub. I was born in Paris in 1938. I didn’t know my name was Mireille until I became a citizen at 13—my parents always called me Mimi. They loved opera, so everything they named was named after an opera. Mireille is a very bad opera by Gounod. Mimì, of course, is the character in La bohème. My sister is Raymonde Elaine—Elena, “la Belle Hélène.” My father’s company in America was called Manon, after Manon Lescaut.
My father was originally from Poland, from a small city on the Polish-Russian border—the youngest of five children, the only surviving male, very much spoiled by the entire family. His father had died when he was young. When the First World War broke out, my grandfather—the chief baggage expediter for the main railroad line connecting St. Petersburg with Warsaw—evacuated the entire family into Russia. My father spent his early years in a small town near St. Petersburg, frequently beaten up as the outsider and the Jew. When the war ended and they returned, his mother died; he was totally orphaned at about 13. He went to live with an older sister in Warsaw, worked odd jobs, saved what he could, and eventually went to France on a visitor’s visa—overstaying it and becoming an illegal immigrant, an itinerant farm worker who followed the crops in Brittany. He learned to speak French so well that nobody ever realized he wasn’t born there. He eventually went back to Paris and learned his future occupation: he became a very skilled leather worker.
He met and married my mother during the Jazz Age. They were a very romantic couple—they got married on New Year’s Eve and tangoed their way across Paris. My mother was also Polish, born in Warsaw into a comfortable family. She had attended a Polish gymnasium, which was quite unusual for Jewish children at the time, and her mother hired a tutor for Hebrew and Yiddish. She had a beautiful singing voice and had voice lessons—hence her love of opera. I vividly remember her singing all over the house and correcting me when I played the piano badly, which was most of the time.
They never thought of going to the United States, but events changed that. Family legend has it that my great-great-grandfather visited America at the turn of the century, declared it “a land of barbarians,” and returned to Warsaw. His brother stayed in Cleveland, Ohio—and that was my grandmother’s family in America. My father had a cousin who had immigrated to Chicago before the First World War and became not only very wealthy, but well-connected—connections that would prove invaluable in saving our lives.
Dad applied for visas. My mother, my sister, and I came under the American quota safely, as my mother had become a French national. My father was a problem—he was considered stateless, a man without a country. Cousin Charlie in Chicago was able to get him what was called a Nansen passport, created by the Norwegian diplomat Fridtjof Nansen for people fleeing the Russian Revolution.
In September of 1939, our entire family—grandma, her husband, aunts, uncles, cousins—were on vacation in Fontainebleau when Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany. We returned to Paris: the men to join the army, the women to wait and worry. My father tried to enlist and was told, “France will surely win the war, and, if we need you, we’ll call you.” My mother was greatly relieved.
The first part of the war was called the “Phony War”—very little military action from September through April or May, when Nazi forces overran Holland and Belgium and entered France. My father was called up again at the end of May. He went to his commanding officer and said: “I’m married. I’m Jewish. Wife, two children. I have papers to go to America. If I serve in the army, which I would be proud to do, I might not live.” The commanding officer said, “Dismissed.”
My father had told my mother to pack a small suitcase. We took what he told me was the last train leaving Paris as the city was about to fall. The train was bombed—Nazi strategy was to bomb civilians—and we were lucky to get off alive. We started walking toward Bordeaux. I still have the shoes I walked in. We couldn’t get into Bordeaux; it was a closed city. The French government had retreated there to negotiate surrender. Thousands of refugees milled around the outskirts.
My father met the American consulate officer who had prepared our papers. She recognized him immediately—his paperwork was so different from any other refugee’s. She needed to get across France from the Atlantic coast to the Mediterranean coast, because the American consulate was being established in Marseille. She offered us a ride across France. My father provided the languages and the expertise. We crossed through Toulouse, across the Pyrenees, and eventually to the Mediterranean coast. We stopped briefly in Perpignan, where my sister needed new shoes and I, as a toddler, wandered off—they found me at the bottom of a shoe cart, very happy. A fixation with shoes.
We crossed the border into Spain. My father told me we weren’t allowed to get off the train—Franco was taking a transit tax from refugees but didn’t want them in his country. We continued on to Portugal, where my father secured passage on a Greek freighter traveling in convoy across the North Atlantic, with real concern about Nazi submarines. We arrived in the United States on August 11, 1940.
We were stopped briefly at Ellis Island—I had broken out in a rash. My mother convinced the doctor it was due to trauma and poor food, and he let us through. He was probably smart enough to know what it was. It wasn’t until years later, after retirement, that I broke out in a rash again—shingles—and realized what I’d had at Ellis Island was chickenpox. I had always wondered why I never caught children’s diseases—but, oh, yes, I had.
My father’s first word in English at Ellis Island: “taxi.” A typical New York City taxi driver took us on the scenic route all over the city and eventually brought us to HIAS (the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society). Dad had $10 left in his pocket. The New York family caught up with us within days. Cousin Charlie had found my father a job at Marshall Fields in Chicago, but the New York family said, “Why are you going to Chicago? New York is the fashion capital of the world.” So we stayed in New York. After the war, my father opened a small factory designing luxury handbags. I grew up in Brooklyn, a very happy child.
Little Madeleine
One of the stories about which I’ve written elsewhere is my cousin Madeleine. She was the daughter of my mother’s sister Séraphine—Séma—and her husband, who were rounded up with the Jews in Paris in 1942. Séma and her husband were sent to Vel d’Hiv, then to Drancy, then to Auschwitz. For years, the family suspected that little Madeleine, who had been the top-ranking student in her entire district, might have survived. On one of my visits to Yad Vashem, I met the chief archivist and we went through all the records. I found her listed on one of the transports. She had been separated from her parents and sent to the French prison camp at Beaune-la-Rolande, and, within several months, she, too, was sent to Auschwitz. She never survived.
Years later, I took my granddaughter Sydney to Paris for her bat mitzvah. We visited the Shoah Memorial and museum. Before the trip, I had written to a cousin asking her to make sure our family names were on the wall of names being constructed. I showed Sydney those names—family names, friends of family whose stories I knew. Then the archivist pulled out a large photograph. She called them “happy family photos”—typical vacation snapshots, everyone smiling—but, in this one, everyone was wearing the Star of David. It was taken during the occupation: a mother, father, and two teenage boys. She asked if I recognized them. I said “no”; I know names, I know stories, but I don’t remember faces. As she started to put it away, I said, “Oh, my God. That’s my mother’s cousin Daniel.” She asked if I was sure. I said I wasn’t certain, but I remembered seeing pictures of him in my mother’s album, and I gave her contact information for my cousin Nina. She said, “Probably not, because we’ve already figured out who they were—but your story confirmed what we knew.” I am not a weepy person, but I was quite upset. My granddaughter said, “Why are you crying, Grandma Mimi?” And I said: “I think of the one and a half million Jewish children who were killed, and how few have anyone left to identify them.”
Fifi
Another story concerns a family friend named Maurice Fefferman, known as Fifi. He was 10 years older than my husband and had come from Poland. During the occupation, he was part of a group of men who organized to assassinate Nazi officers—the ones who gave the orders. Many were Jewish refugees, but not all. They worked in pairs, with a pact to protect each other until death. One night on a mission, Fifi’s partner was killed. Fifi turned back to help him, was wounded and captured, brought to a French hospital, tortured—and revealed nothing about the group.
I thought it was a remarkable story of bravery. I learned later that a film was made about this group—Army of Shadows—a wonderful film, though, unfortunately, I can’t show it at our Holocaust museum because of the subtitles. Many years later, walking through the 9th arrondissement in Paris, I passed an old building with a plaque: dedicated to Maurice Fefferman, killed in 1942. I knew the story was real, but finding that plaque made it come home. I use it now in our “Acts of Courage” programming at the museum. When Maurice died, his body was released to his family for a Jewish funeral. My father-in-law attended that funeral, knowing it would be surrounded by Gestapo—another act of courage.
On one of my visits to Yad Vashem, I met the chief archivist and we went through all the records. I found her listed on one of the transports. She had been separated from her parents and sent to the French prison camp at Beaune-la-Rolande, and, within several months, she, too, was sent to Auschwitz. She never survived.
Uncle Léon
My mother’s brother, Uncle Léon, was my favorite among my three surviving uncles. He was charming, spoke many languages including Esperanto, and told me wonderful stories as a little girl—some of which I suspected may not have been entirely true. The story I tell about him is this: he was waiting in line for food during the occupation. The hours for Jewish shoppers were even more limited than for non-Jews. He was flirting with the young woman behind him, because Uncle Léon was good-looking and a bit of a flirt. When the shopkeeper returned with his order and said it was the last of whatever he’d requested, the woman said she wished she had it—she needed it for a sick relative. Léon, the charmer, turned to her and said, “Pour vous, mademoiselle,” and handed it to her.
They went their separate ways. Several days later, he was caught in a roundup and marched with a group of men into the local police station. The secretary at the desk was the young woman with whom he had been flirting. She managed to separate him from the group and convey to him that the others would be sent east by bus. Everybody knew what that meant at that time, but she managed—I’m not quite sure—to get him out of the building into the streets, and, from there, he went from occupied France into “unoccupied” France. I don’t know how she managed to do that: I suspect that she was part of a resistance network, and the people in the network helped him move from one place to the other. From there, he traveled south through Marseille to Casablanca, where he boarded a ship called the Serpa Pinto. On that ship, unbeknownst to each other, were my grandmother, her husband, my father’s sister and her husband, and my cousin Marcel. They all arrived in the United States in 1942.
David + Jacques
My husband David’s story will appear in another anthology, but briefly: he was sent out of Paris to a small farming community in the south when France surrendered. His brother Jacques, fighting for the French Foreign Legion, was later dismissed and joined him there. In October of 1940, Jacques took Davide back to Paris. On the train, a Nazi soldier examined David’s papers—“David Taub,” not a typical French name—and the officer must have known he was Jewish. He let them through.
Days later, Jacques was summoned to the local mairie (town hall) and arrested. He was sent to the prison camp at Beaune-la-Rolande. My mother-in-law was determined to get him out. With the help of their French neighbors—railroad workers, many of them socialist and part of the early resistance—she traveled with David from Paris to a small hamlet near the camp, knocked on a stranger’s door, and said simply, “I’m here to help my son escape.” The woman who answered—Madame Dubois—said “Absolutely not,” then invited them into the kitchen and said “We’ll talk.” Her gendarme son helped devise the escape. Jacques, a trained electrician who was permitted to go into town on a work pass, walked out with a platoon of workers on the designated day—the guard at the gate was in on it—and David had a bicycle waiting for him outside. Jacques pedaled off.
He eventually made his way to Toulon, which was being bombed by the British. He went to his employer for help, was rebuffed, realized he could be denounced, and never returned. He joined the Maquis and survived the war.
I am not a weepy person, but I was quite upset. My granddaughter said, “Why are you crying, Grandma Mimi?” And I said: “I think of the one and a half million Jewish children who were killed, and how few have anyone left to identify them.”
David himself was sent back to the farming village for safety. This time the conditions were harsher—he was treated like a farm laborer, given all the chores, and never quite enough food. The woman of the house said they never had to wash his plate, it was so clean. The only person who truly loved him there was the old great-grandmother, who spoke only Provençal. When a student once asked David if anything good had ever happened to him during the war, he pointed to his teeth and smiled. “I never had a cavity,” he said. “They took away my sugar ration.”
The priest in the village came to David the second time and said, “I’ll see you in church tomorrow.” David said, “I’m not converting.” The priest replied, “I’m not trying to convert you; I’m trying to save your life.” David became an altar boy and the leader of the Catholic boy scouts. He was told not to go swimming in the local stream because, obviously, he was circumcised. His name on the posted school rankings was always buried near the bottom to avoid attention—but he was the top student.
David always called his story “the kindness of strangers,” because so many decent people had reached out to help them—without obligation, without reward, simply because they were decent.
Twenty years ago, a young cousin of mine, Déborah, was chatting at the school gate with another mother at the start of the school year. They discovered that both their grandfathers had been hidden on the same farm during the occupation. Their two children became lifelong friends. Jacques nominated the farmers for Yad Vashem recognition, and David—the only one still alive who could remember them and what they did—wrote the testimony. The ceremony was held in France, and the two children who had met at the school gate gave the speech. I think that’s quite heartwarming.
I was one of the lucky ones. My dedication to my book, The Last Train to Paris, says something to the effect of: “The joke’s on you, Hitler.”
We survived, we laughed, and that’s exactly how I feel. We made a life for ourselves in America—and I hope we’ve transmitted those legacies to our grandchildren.
