My family, my father, my mother, and my sister Rachel who was 10 years older than I, we were a very lucky family. We survived the war.
My parents were born in Warsaw, Poland, and lived in very religious homes. My mother, the second youngest child of nine children, went to Polish school and learned how to play the piano. They were comfortable. But my father, the youngest of three children, lived in extreme poverty, having lost his father when he was three; he started to work when he was 12-years-old. He learned a trade which sustained him all his life. He made ladies handbags. He became a craftsman, an artisan.
At 18, he became secular and the joined the Jewish Socialist Party, called the Bund, and fought all his life for better conditions for workers. After World War I, he went to Belgium and met my mother. They were married in Brussels on January 6, 1922, and Rachel was born a year later.
My father tried a few times to come to America, but to no avail. In 1926, they moved to Paris where they joined the Bund, and Rachel went to Yiddish school.
I was born in 1932, and, at that time, the law was if your parents were foreigners, you had to be naturalized. So, at age of one, I was naturalized and became a French citizen, the first in my family.
My father also joined the French Socialist Party and with political connections was able to obtain French citizenship for his family. So, in 1938, my parents and Rachel became French citizens. In France before the war, Jews from Poland did not receive French citizenship.
I had a very pleasant early childhood. I went to kindergarten where they showed us Charlie Chaplin movies. We called him Charlot.
September 1, 1939, everything changed. The Germans invaded Poland; France and England declared ware against Germany. They then invaded Holland, and on May 10, 1940, Belgium fell and they started to march through France.
Panic. My father said: “Where the Germans are I do not want to be. So let’s leave.”
On June 11, 1940, three days before they marched through Paris we fled to a small village in the center of France in the Massif Central mountains, similar to the Catskills.
My parents rented a small room above a watchmaker’s shop. The next morning I woke up and saw my father in front of the mirror saying: “I am all gray.” He became gray overnight. He had beautiful black hair the day before.
A week later the town crier went around beating his drum and called everyone to the village square, where the mayor announced in tears that France had signed an armistice with Germany; our country had lost the war.
I asked my father, what does armistice mean? He explained to me that it was the end of the war, but we Jews were in danger because of a very bad man called Hitler.
France was divided in two parts: the occupied zone from the north to the center of France, Paris included, and the rest of the country became the Free Zone ruled by the Vichy government.
We were lucky to be in the Free Zone area so we went to Lyon, the second largest city in France. We rented an apartment outside of Lyon. My father worked in the apartment; Rachel went to work for a big French company; I went to school; and my mother had the hard task of trying to feed us. The winter of 1940 and 1941 was very harsh, and the Germans took everything—food, fuel, etc. It was hard. Other Bundists came to Lyon so they formed a resistance network.
Being French citizens, my family was at an advantage, and they used that advantage to help other Jews. Rachel, 18 at the time, became their courier. My father made her a pocketbook with a false bottom to store false identity papers inside. Rachel, as part of her position in the network, would travel by bus or train and deliver false papers to Jews in hiding. She would help families memorize their new identity, speak to them in Yiddish if they did not speak French, and sometimes travel with them to the Spanish or Swiss border.
In 1941, Suzanne Buisson, who had been in the high echelons of the French Socialist Party, came to see my father and asked him: “Will you help us?” My father said yes. So she gave him pamphlets to distribute and paste on the walls in Lyon. He then became the liaison between the two resistance networks. Suzanne was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and deported. In the Montmartre section of Paris there is a Square called Suzanne Buisson, Resistante.
We had people staying in our apartment from time to time. A couple from Belgium stayed with us almost six months. They never went out. My mother risked her life to provide food for everyone. She was Mother Courage.
France had the highest rate of Jewish survivors of all the countries in Europe. I think it is due to having a free zone for more than two years. Jews with visas could sail out of France, and families with enough cash could hide in little villages and blend with the scenery.
My parents had friends who were hiding in a very small village, and they mailed us a rabbit. My mother declared to us: it is a chicken. We did not argue with her. We were so happy to eat meat.
We had a radio and listened to the BBC every night to hear real news. One night, Churchill spoke to us in perfect French and told us: “We shall not forget you.” It was so uplifting. Churchill was a great man.
In November 1942, the American army landed in North Africa, and the Germans occupied Lyon. We lost our naturalization and became foreign Jews so we fled to Grenoble in the Alps, which was occupied by the Italian army who did not bother Jews.
In Grenoble as in Lyon my father worked in the apartment we rented; Rachel worked in an office; I went to school; and my mother would pass checkpoints and go to farms outside of Grenoble and bring us good food. The resistance became more intense, and life became more dangerous.
One time, Rachel had to go to a very important meeting run by the network. She got sick and could not go so my mother went in her place. It was very risky but she went anyway.
In the fall of 1943, the Germans occupied Grenoble and all of France: we were trapped. In the middle of the night, we were awakened by endless ringing of the bell, knocking on the door. The French police were looking for Italian deserters, since we lived in an Italian neighborhood.
Of course we did not know that; we thought they were looking for Jews. My father decided not to open the door. The police were ready to force the door down, but luckily our neighbors told them there are old people living here who are never home. The police left but I was shaking for the rest of the night. Our neighbors saved our lives but we were no longer safe.
One night, Churchill spoke to us in perfect French and told us: “We shall not forget you.” It was so uplifting. Churchill was a great man.
I was sent to a Catholic boarding school in the mountains where I went to mass every Sunday, skied, and pretended to be happy. But in early 1944 Jewish children were arrested by the Gestapo in a nearby convent so my parents decided to send me to Switzerland. A group of parents, most of them Buddhist, hired a passeur, a smuggler, and I joined a group of ten children and took the train from Grenoble to Annemasse, a border town.
Along with us were a married couple. The wife was very pregnant, and she began having labor pains in the train. On our arrival to the town, the smuggler told use to wait for him at the train station, and he took the couple to a hotel. He came back and took us to a field behind the buses, telling us to lie still and wait for his return.
It was very cold and getting dark, and in front of us was a road with German tanks and big trucks passing by. The oldest among us was 18 years old. He had a thermos with hot coffee and crawled from child to child giving us a sip. I will never forget him.
Meanwhile, at the hotel the smuggler had been arrested and gave away our location to the French police, who took us into custody. The officer at the station was given carte blanche by his superior, that is do what you want, so instead of delivering us to the Germans they took us to a boarding school at the border. From there, the lady principal and her assistant risked their lives by sneaking us to the French/Swiss border, and we climbed a barbed wire fence to safety.
Because I climbed that barbed wire fence I have grandchildren today.
In Switzerland we were arrested by the authorities because we were illegal aliens. We were taken to an internment camp called Le Camp du Bout du Monde—the camp of the end of the world. We were not treated well, slept on wooden floors, and were not well fed. I was hungry all the time. But they saved our lives.
I then was placed in a foster home in Basel, then in a convent, then to another foster home in a tiny village near the late of Thun. I was very unhappy and very worried about my parents and Rachel.
During the war, names like Rachel, Sarah, David, or Jacob were death sentences. So Rachel became Raymonde officially and to all her friends. The American army liberated Grenoble on my birthday, August 22, 1944. On that day, a friend of the family came to the street where they lived and in front of their window shouted with all of her strength: Rachel. They were free.
In March 1945 I came back to Grenoble and was reunited with my family. A month later we returned to Paris. We had survived.
Three hundred years ago, French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote:
A startling and unique spectacle to see a people expatriated, having no land for over two thousand years, a people damaged, blamed, mixed with strangers for even a longer time, rejected, a people dispersed throughout the world, a people persecuted, despised by all nations, still conserving their customs, their laws, their traditions.
Athens, Sparta, Rome perished an left no children on earth. Zion destroyed, did not lose their children. They saved them, they multiplied, extending throughout the world. And they always recognize each other, they mix with all people but never conform, they have no chief but are always a people, they have no country but are always citizens.
We Jews will survive, no matter what happens.
