Child survivor recalls Shoah

RENE GOLDMAN

For Jewish people, 2012 is a year of significant and, for the most part, tragic anniversaries. Each one of these anniversaries impacted in some way on my childhood.

One hundred years ago, the great pedagogue Janusz Korczak opened in Warsaw his Dom Sierot, Home for Orphans, intended to be the very opposite of the conventional orphanage (sierociniec), for this was truly a home: in it, Korczak put into practice his conviction that children should be respected as individuals and should learn how to govern themselves. Korczak’s institution of the children’s republic is one in which I was raised, along with 40 other orphans of the Shoah in a maison d’enfants de deportes et fusilles – home for children whose parents were deported or shot – run by the CCE, the children-saving commission of the Jewish communist resistance organization UJRE, in the Parisian suburb of Livry-Gargan. In our home, every child belonged to one of eight commissions, whose elected chairpersons formed, together with the adults that were our educators, the directorate of the home. Our republic even had an anthem, of which I wrote the lyrics and the noted composer Ilya Holodenko the music.

The other centennial of significance to me as a child survivor of the Shoah is that of the founding in 1912 in St. Petersburg of the OSE, an organization dedicated to the objective of bringing medical and other assistance to victims of Russian pogroms, particularly children. In the years following the Bolshevik Revolution, the OSE moved to Berlin, where it was placed under the honorary presidency of Albert Einstein. After the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, the OSE moved again: first to Paris, then to Montpelier in the Unoccupied Zone, or “Free Zone,” of France in 1940.

The OSE, now spelled out in French as Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (Children’s Rescue Organization), operated a cluster of maisons d’enfants, children’s homes, housed in castles in the Creuse, a rural region of central France. These homes sheltered Jewish children sent down from the Occupied Zone by their parents, as well as refugee children from foreign countries, like me, a native of Luxembourg. I spent a few weeks at the Château du Masgelier in September 1942, but had to be removed to safer surroundings, as the French police sometimes searched these homes for children who did not have French citizenship. Aware of the threat hanging over Jewish children, the OSE created an extensive underground network, which scouted farming communities and Catholic institutions for hiding places. The OSE is credited with having saved the lives of about 5,000 children as a result.

Seventy years ago, in January 1942, Adolf Eichmann and other Nazi chiefs held a conference at Wannsee at which was programmed the “Final Solution,” code for the extermination of the Jewish people in Europe. The extermination camps in Eastern Europe soon became fully functional, daily processing thousands through their gas chambers and crematoria. Holding the children of his orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto by the hand to comfort them, Korczak boarded with these doomed children the train bound for Treblinka, even though he was given a chance to save himself.

In Western Europe, the step-by-step isolation of Jews from the general population was the prelude to mass murder. In 1940, the French government obliged the German occupiers by conducting a census of the Jewish population. As a next step, it promulgated the Statut des Juifs, the most sweeping antisemitic legislation in Europe: it defined as a Jew any person that had three grandparents or two grandparents and a spouse of the Jewish “race.” While French Jews, said to be under government protection, were dismissed from the professions, foreign Jews, mainly immigrants from Eastern Europe, were interned at the discretion of regional police prefects, in labor camps like Pithiviers in the Occupied Zone or in “family grouping centres” like the camp of Rivesaltes in the “Free Zone” near the Spanish border. The French “Gulag Archipelago” covered both zones, but internment was only a preliminary step to deportation to Auschwitz and other death camps and, toward that end, a transit camp was established in the Parisian suburb of Drancy. As a result, Drancy became known as “the Antechamber of Death.”

On March 27, 1942, the first of 43 convoys of cattle cars bound for Auschwitz left Drancy. It transported 1,112 men, who were told that they were being sent to work in the Ardennes. To disguise that lie, 43 French gendarmes and only one SS escorted the train to the Belgian border, from where it was rerouted to Auschwitz. On July 16 and 17, the Grande Rafle (Great Roundup), operation code-named “Spring Wind” (“Vent Printanier”), took place. The greatest manhunt in the history of Paris, conducted entirely by the French police, it netted 13,000 Jews, including more than 4,000 children, almost none of whom survived. The convoys that left after that date comprised entire families.

Memorial to the Jews Deported from France, 1942-1944, compiled by lawyer and Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld in 1978, lists by numbered convoys the names of the nearly 80,000 Jews so transported, and supplements these lists with documents such as the correspondence between French bureaucrats and the German authorities relating to these transports. Thus, Convoy 33, which left Drancy on Sept. 16, was comprised of 586 men and 407 women rounded up in the “Free Zone” and first interned in Rivesaltes. One of these women was my mother and I would have been on that train to death with her had I not been miraculously wrested from the clutches of the French police at the last minute. It is important to mention here that a revised and expanded edition of Klarsfeld’s book was issued this March, in time for the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the departure of the first convoy from France.

On June 7, 1942, the Jews of the Occupied Zone of France were ordered to sew a yellow star marked with the word “Juif” on their outer garments. In Belgium, the wearing of the yellow star was imposed in May. At the same time, Jews were forbidden to leave the country and ordered to concentrate in the four major cities of Brussels, Antwerp, Malines and Liege. In 1940, my parents and I had moved from Luxembourg to Brussels, where I began to attend elementary school and saw signs go up in front of theatres and public parks prohibiting entrance to “Jews and dogs.” After having been humiliated by children who spotted the yellow star on my coat, I refused to continue wearing it and my parents did likewise. Facing growing danger, we illegally crossed into France, hoping to reach Marseille and there catch a ship bound for Uruguay.

We managed after some adventures to cross the Occupied Zone and, guided by a passeur (smuggler), the demarcation line separating it from the “Free Zone.” In the latter half of the country, where the French government enjoyed full sovereignty, we discovered that we were not in security either. Jews who did not have French citizenship were being hunted down, interned and transported under police escort back to the north, directly into the hands of the Germans. We had come to France at the worst possible time, after the Grand Rafle. Eichmann’s instruction was that, for the time being, children below the age of 16 should not be taken, as most of them were born in France, but the prime minister, Pierre Laval, on his own initiative, ordered that the children be arrested as well, arguing that it would be “cruel” to separate them from their parents. Besides, he proffered that he assumed personal responsibility for “ridding France of the Jews.” Eventually, Eichmann gave his assent.

One month later, on Aug. 26, the Vichy regime, on its own initiative, conducted a similar roundup of non-French Jews in the “Unoccupied Zone.” This happened soon after my parents and I were arrested when we crossed the demarcation line and interned in a requisitioned hotel of the city of Lons-le-Saunier, north of Lyon. One morning the police returned for us: my father managed to escape from their clutches, while my mother and I found ourselves among the hundreds of people led to the railway station by brutish policemen who insulted and shoved us.

Just as we reached the railway station, Aunt Fella, my mother’s oldest sister and a French citizen, arrived on an overnight train from Limoges. She attempted to drag me away during a moment of inattention by the police commissar, but the latter suddenly turned around, ran after us, slapped my aunt and, seizing me by the hair and the seat, ran with me toward the train waiting to take us south to Rivesaltes, the worst of the French internment camps. As the commissar was running with me, I saw my poor mother, a petite woman, being dragged by three policemen on the floor of the station. Screams and shouts filled the hallway. The commissar was about to throw me into the train, when two khaki-clad gendarmes rushed to speak to him; without a word, he handed me over to them. Those two men were kind; one of them turned my head to his chest, so that I would see no more of the terrible scenes around me; then, as the train began to move, he turned my head back to face the train and pointed to my mother waving to me from a window. That was the last time I saw her.

The gendarmes released me into the care of Aunt Fella, who that afternoon took me to see my father and then took me with her back to Limoges. Not long afterwards, she placed me in the care of the OSE, which sheltered me in its Château du Masgelier. Had it not been for my aunt’s timely arrival in Lons-le-Saunier, I would have met my end, still a small child, 70 years ago. From the Masgelier, I was sent with several other children to Vendoeuvres, a village of the Berry region, not far from Chateauroux, where I lived with a very caring young rural family and attended the village public school.

In November 1942, the Germans invaded the south and the Italians the Alpine regions: there no longer was a “Free Zone.” It became imperative for us Jewish children to be moved from Vendoeuvres to a more secure hiding place. A couple from the OSE underground came the following February to move us to a Catholic convent school situated in an isolated rural region. There, I lived for more than a year under a false identity: I had become René Garnier, born in Chateauroux, instead of Luxembourg.

In the spring of 1944, I had to be moved again. This time, I was placed in the care of my father, who had become a member of the Jewish resistance underground in Lyon. In the wake of the Allied landing in Normandy, conditions in the city became increasingly unsettled and my father managed to hide me with a farming family about 50 kilometres outside of Lyon. It was in that village that I happened to find myself when American troops marching on Lyon liberated us. Before long, my aunt came for me and placed me in a Zionist children’s home in the Alps and then, later, in the Jewish communist children’s homes of the CCE in the Paris region, where I lived until the age of 16. In the meantime, I had to absorb another shock: that of learning that my father, who was my hero, was caught one month before the liberation of Lyon in September 1944 and put by Klaus Barbie, “the Butcher of Lyon,” on the last train that left France for Auschwitz. He perished at the end of the death march out of Auschwitz in January 1945.

With the knowledge and memory of all that happened 70 years ago in mind, I see myself as a surviving witness to the war of extermination waged on Jewish children by the German Nazis and their French and other collaborators. That particular aspect of the Shoah is encapsulated in a speech made by SS commander-in-chief Heinrich Himmler in Poznan, Poland, in October 1943: “I felt that I did not have the right to exterminate the men, while allowing the children to grow up and take revenge on our children and descendants. It became necessary to adopt the grave decision to make this people disappear from the earth.”

René Goldman is professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia. A version of this article was published in The Hidden Child, published by the Hidden Child Foundation.

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