My father’s story

My father was born and raised in Paris to Jewish-Polish immigrant parents. During World-War II he and his younger brother were sent to hide in a little village in France called Foulletourte. They had to keep their Jewish identity secret to avoid being taken by the Germans to the extermination Camps.

The local Priest made my father a choir boy in church to intensify his non-Jewish identity, but avoided giving him the sanctified bread in honor of his real religion. My father remembers that he actually wanted to taste the bread to be like everyone else. In a later visit to this village, we found out that this priest was a member of the French Resistance (a French movement which fought against the Nazi-German occupation) that was later captured and murdered by the Germans. Later on, my father’s Jewish identity was uncovered and he had to wear the yellow badge (טְלַ�י צָהֹב) that was made mandatory by the Vichy regime in France to identify him as a Jew.

One day, the German police arrived and took my father, his brother, and some other Jewish children to a transit camp, not far from Paris – Drancy.

Only lately, it was uncovered that the informant was the French woman who was in charge of the kids. Her son was a very good friend of my father. Drancy was a camp that used to hold Jews(יְהוּדִי�) who were later deported to the extermination camps(מַחֲנוֹת הַש�ְמָדָה) . The conditions in this camp were not human – my father was hungry all the time but shared the little food he had with his brother.

One of the women at the camp suggested that he should ask the German commander of the camp to release him and his brother because his mother died and his father was a prisoner-of-war and he was the only one to take care of his younger brother. He remembers waiting in a very long line to speak to the commander. Eventually he entered an enormous room. The room was the size of a whole floor. In a lower floor, sixty people lived in the same amount of space. The commander sat at the far end of the room, and the distance between the door and the commander seemed endless to the eye of my nine-year old father. With much courage, he approached the authority and explained his situation. To his surprise, few days later, he was released from the camp together with his brother and some other children. 65,000-80,000 Jews were deported from Drancy, of these, more than 63,000 were murdered including 6,000 children. My father was more than lucky.

But his troubles were yet to be ended. He was sent to an orphanage in the part of Paris that was occupied by the Germans. This was better than the camp, but it was important to move to the unoccupied zone. One day, an acquaintance of the family let him know that he will help my father and his brother escape into the unoccupied zone. He had to keep it in secret from his friends and his 5-year-old talkative brother. Eventually, they escaped to a Metro station and met their helper. Now, it was important to get rid of the yellow badge, but after taking it off his coat, the unfaded Star-of-David fabric was very clear and could reveal his Jewish identity. He went to the bathroom and smeared his coat to cover the unfaded area. Eventually, they arrived at Marseille that was at the unoccupied zone of France.

When I think about the level of responsibility my father had to carry as a nine-year-old and the fact that I do not allow my own nine-year-old son to cross the street by himself, I feel very proud of my father. Moreover, I feel compassionate to this little boy that had to carry so much on his little shoulders. In-spite of his difficult life condition, the uncertainty, and the parent role he had to take at such a young age, he was later able to create an emotional good relationships and a healthy family of his own. My seven-year-old daughter told me today, after studying about the Holocaust in school, “If Saba wouldn’t have survived the camps, we weren’t alive, and that’s not good.�

Remembering the Children of the Holocaust

The French children, who survived the Holocaust, always felt that they didn’t suffer enough to consider themselves as Holocaust survivors(נִצּוֹלִי�) . Only at 1993, the Israeli Association of Children who were Hidden in France during the Holocaust – “Aloumim� - עֲלוּמִי� was established to remember and document the memories of these children and to support the survivors.

Today is the Remembrance Day for the Holocaust and Heroism  – We must not forget!

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