Hidden Children conference – Extracts from Moussa Abadi’s speech
May 21, 1995
A few weeks ago, on the initiative of Yale University, at the request of one of our hidden children, Julien Engel, who lives in Washington, Annette Wieviorka, whom you have just heard and who had been commissioned by this foundation, asked us, for the foundation’s archives, to leaf through the album of images of our dead life. It was the first time in fifty years that Odette and I had agreed to open up, to give ourselves away. And Annette, I must say, came out with her “how?” and her “why?” with a great deal of tact, a great deal of sensitivity and, I would add, a great deal of talent. I speak as a connoisseur: I spent twenty-five years of my life putting theatre people to the question. But after this video interview, recorded in a makeshift studio, it must be said, after seven hours – seven hours of interview – Odette and I went home both relieved and uneasy. Relieved to have granted Julien Engel’s wish and to have got to know a little better a historian of the calibre of Annette Wieviorka. But uneasy because, without having agreed on it, we had not told everything. We had not even told what mattered most. All former deportees will tell you the same. All those who took part in what Malraux called “the war in the shadows” never tell everything. Deep inside themselves they keep a little secret garden that they do not want to reveal to others. So we had not told everything. And we do not intend to tell everything. But when we got home we were, in the medical sense of the word, ill. It took us a good week to recover.
So you will understand that today I do not want to go back over the ground I covered with Annette Wieviorka. I am going to try to answer two questions: the first, which we have been asked for fifty years, and the second, which we have been asked for a few months. And along the way, I will try to touch on the most striking and sometimes the most tragic moments of our astonishing adventure.
The first question we are asked – and heaven knows we are asked it – is this (I am caricaturing a little, summarising): “How, why did you do it? What made you join the fray? How, by what roundabout ways, did you come to clandestine life?”
And every time I am asked this question – and heaven knows we have been asked it for some fifty years – an evening and an encounter come back to me.
Because we were in the right place at the right time.
Well, when I am asked this question, I feel like answering: “Odette and I needed to ‘pass through the clouds’.” And also because we were in the right place at the right time.
But it must also be said that we had had – I at least had had – two terrible shocks, which I would call founding shocks. Well before the Italian occupation – so we were under Vichy – on a radiant morning, under a postcard sky fit for a honeymoon, I saw a crowd on the seaward side of the Promenade des Anglais. I went closer, and what I saw has remained engraved in my heart, and I will carry it with me to my last breath: a woman lying on the ground, covered in blood – the poet would have said “lying on the ground before the face of God”. In front of her, a jackbooted militiaman was slowly, methodically smashing her skull, in front of some twenty terrified witnesses; and beside her, a slightly younger woman – I would learn much later that she was her sister – was holding by the hand a six-year-old child who was screaming: “Mummy, Mummy, Mummy!” I fled, and I began to shout in the streets. People turned to look at me as I passed. Whom was I railing against? God! I was saying to Him: “Why have you forsaken her, why are you absent when there are crimes like this?” It was a dreadful shock.
When the Germans come here, your children will suffer greatly!
A few months later, the Italians were in Nice. Defeat was in the air for them. A friend said to me: “There is a chaplain with the Italian troops coming back from Russia who needs to talk to someone. Would you agree to meet him?” I said yes. I went to see him in a room in a requisitioned hotel on the heights of Cimiez. I was received by a very tall, very handsome, very dark priest with a very fine beard. He wore an off-white cassock. He invited me to sit down and said: “Monsieur, you are not going to believe what I am about to tell you. But I want to say it, because I am going back to the Russian front, I will probably die, and I would like someone to know.” And he told me what he had seen on the Russian front, what the Waffen-SS were doing to our children. Well, I will not tell you, because it is unspeakable! When he had finished, I said to him: “Father, you were right, I don’t believe you; barbarity has its limits!” He said: “Very well!” He slowly unbuttoned his cassock, took out a wooden crucifix, placed it between his hands and said: “I, Giulio Penitenti, priest, swear on this crucifix that I have told you nothing but the truth! Now you are free not to believe me!” Before leaving me he added: “When the Germans come here, your children will suffer greatly! I will have warned you!” And I believe that at that moment he was weeping.
So the signs were there. What if the Germans came? What if the Germans occupied the southern zone? What would become of the children? It must be said that Nice was full of Jews. They had been brought from Savoie and Haute-Savoie, with the best intentions in the world, to get them across into Italy. The Germans would be much quicker. Odette and I asked ourselves: “What can we do? What must we do? And when they are here, whom should we save? And how?” The answer to the first question was very easy: we had to save the humblest, the most vulnerable, those who would be in the greatest danger – that is, the children. It was the second question we could not answer. How to save them? It was then that I had the idea of asking a Jesuit father to obtain an audience for me with Monsignor Rémond, Bishop of Nice. This Jesuit father knew me; he knew that I was a student of Gustave Cohen and that I was working on the tales and fabliaux of the Middle Ages. He went to see Monsignor Rémond and let me know that he would receive me the next day. But he had not told him why I wanted to see him.
I have come to ask you to try to live your Gospels…
I went into Monsignor Rémond’s office. I do not want to tell you about the whole audience; it lasted twenty minutes, and I said to him: “Monseigneur, I am a Jew. I come from far away. I come from one of the oldest ghettos in the world. I have come to ask you to take risks; to try to live your Gospels as I am going to try to live my Bible. You can throw me out, you can send me away. But know that without you, I will not be able to save the children.” Monsignor Rémond was behind his desk. On it he had – I will always see them – half a dozen pairs of glasses, which he broke when he was nervous or moved. He played with a pair of glasses. “I am going to try to think about it.” But when I reached the door he said to me: “I rather think you have convinced me!” And he added: “I rather think you have converted me!”
We had to steal their identity. We were identity thieves.
So I had my office at the bishop’s residence. My office, with my false stamps. I had become a great forger, with the help of Monsignor Rémond, who lent me a hand from time to time. And once we had Monsignor Rémond’s agreement, we asked the bishopric to give us the list of all the convents, all the religious institutions and all the families that might take in a Jewish child. I remind you that we were still under the Italian occupation. We wanted to draw up a plan of campaign. Everything had been prepared to take in between 150 and 200 children in the event of disaster. And one day the Germans invaded Nice. Those who did not live through the day the Germans arrived in Nice cannot imagine what that manhunt was like. Jews were picked up – forgive me for using this expression – by the shovelful. Everywhere. In hotels, on pavements, in the streets. And there we were, the two of us, Odette and I, gathering up children who came from all over. Concierges sent them to us. Their parents came with them, left them and went away. We began to place them all over the place, in religious institutions, in convents, in families. But while we could do that with teenagers of 12 or 13, telling them, “Your name is no longer Epelbaum, your name is no longer Jeannette Zvita; your name is Rocher, your name is Durand,” – that was easy – we could not just drop children of six or seven like that into a school or a family. We had to steal their identity. We were identity thieves. We tried to “depersonalise” them in a villa placed at our disposal by the convent of the Poor Clares. And this atrocious, odious, dreadful operation went on for hours. “Your name is no longer Epelbaum, your name is Rocher! Repeat! What’s your name? Rocher!” And it went on! We started again. Two nuns from the convent kept watch, Sister Emmanuelle and Sister Andréa. Sister Andréa – I knew – was very ill. Sister Emmanuelle had told me that she had only a few months to live. And one very cold day I went down and said to Sister Andréa: “Sister, you must go back into the convent, you’ll catch your death.” She said to me: “Monsieur Marcel” – that was my code name; my network was called the Marcel network – “Monsieur Marcel, grant me the joy, the happiness, the grace, before I die, of helping you and helping these children!” And two or three months later, I saw a priest arrive at the bishop’s residence. He said to me: “I have come to give you a message from Sister Andréa, who has left us; I was with her in her last moments. She told me: ‘Tell Monsieur Marcel that I will pray for him and for his children!’”
And when the children had been “depersonalised”, when they had been thoroughly stripped of their identity, we entrusted them to families. I remember – and Odette especially remembers – a woman, Madame Belliol, who said to Odette: “Give me the most deprived, the ugliest, the plainest, the sickest!” Odette arrived at her home with a baby a few months old. His name was Bernard Lazarovitch. Where are you, Bernard Lazarovitch? We gave him to this woman, who was poor and who agreed to take the most deprived of our children. Another of our children I had placed with a railwayman and his wife in the suburbs of Nice, in Saint-Laurent-du-Var. I called in a little later to see whether all was well, and the woman said to me: “Monsieur, I can’t take any more. Since you entrusted him to me, this child has said only one sentence: ‘Where’s Mummy, where’s Mummy, where’s Mummy?’” And she pushed me into a room that served as dining room, kitchen and living room all in one. The child was curled up in an armchair. I went up to him, stroked his cheeks and said: “How are you, little one?” He said to me: “Where’s Mummy, where’s Mummy, where’s Mummy?” That was our daily bread.
Monseigneur, what you are doing is madness! Your handwriting is known throughout the diocese; you will be arrested, tortured, perhaps shot! He said to me: “Well then, you would go up to heaven with me – you wouldn’t be in such bad company!”
But once the children had been placed, the work was only beginning. And that is where Odette came in. It would embarrass me to say it, but truly, what she did, no one else could have done. She had to rush from one place to another with clothes. What did these children need? A little tenderness, a little friendship, a little love. She brought them tenderness, friendship and love, sometimes a bar of chocolate, sometimes some clothes, sometimes letters. And off we went. At one point Garel, my companion in misfortune, who was doing the same work in other départements, said to me: “I don’t think you’ll manage. I’m going to send you an assistant.” He sent us an assistant called Huguette Wahl. I renamed her Odile Varlet. She lasted three weeks. After three weeks, she was arrested. She was taking clothes to an institution. Arrested, atrociously tortured, deported and gassed. And once again Odette and I were alone. Odette ran around – really, everywhere. She went from Cannes to Grasse, to Nice, in the rain, in the snow. And I was there, at the bishop’s residence, with my false stamps and my false papers. I produced them. Families were willing to look after these children, but they had nothing to feed them with. We had to make ration cards – those of my age know very well that during the war you did not eat if you did not have a ration card. I made them; I had become an unrivalled forger. And some days Monsignor Rémond would come down to my office and say: “Come on, I’ll give you a hand!” He wrote ration cards! One day I said to him: “Monseigneur, what you are doing is madness! Your handwriting is known throughout the diocese; you will be arrested, tortured, perhaps shot!” He said to me: “Well then, you would go up to heaven with me – you wouldn’t be in such bad company!” And he went on making false papers. And the days went by, with their surprises and their dramas. Every day, every single day, there was fear! It has been called the time of courage. No. It was the time of fear. Not for us, not for Odette. We knew we did not have one chance in a million of getting through it. But the children? It would have taken only one link in the chain to break for everything else to collapse. And we carried on every morning, saying to ourselves: “Will we be here this evening? Who will look after the children?” We made index cards with their photos, their names, their false names, their family name, the names of family friends and the last known address. Just in case – you never knew. Claudel gave one of his masterpieces a subtitle: “The worst is not always certain.” Well, in those days, the worst was almost always certain.
… I learnt that Odette had been deported, sent to Drancy.
And it fell on us one April morning. I had gone to Paris to contact the director of the JOINT – two days’ travel there and two days back. I arrived, jumped on my bike and rushed to meet Odette at the flat where she lived, which served as our letter box. I arrived. A few metres away, the concierge was there; she gave me a nod. And I understood. And I pedalled. For three hours. I had gone mad. I came back at night. She opened the door to me. She said: “They’ve just left. They arrested Madame Delattre” – Odette was called Sylvie Delattre – “they arrested Madame Delattre this morning. They set a trap. If you had come half an hour earlier, you would have found them here.” And I no longer knew what to do. Odette was being interrogated at the Excelsior, then at the Hermitage. We knew; we had information. And then, after a week, I learnt that Odette had been deported, sent to Drancy. I went up to the bishop’s residence and said to Monsignor Rémond: “Sylvie has taken the road to Drancy.” I am not ashamed to say that he and I breathed a sigh of relief – relief for her and relief for us. For her, thinking that she would no longer be interrogated – everyone knows what a Gestapo interrogation is. Relief for us, because we were at peace; we knew she would not talk. But who could have sworn that she would hold out under torture?
I must add one thing. Fifty years later, one of our hidden children went to the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine and said: “I would like to see the file on the Abadi network.” They told him: “We have nothing.” The young man got angry. He said: “What? 527 children saved, and you have nothing?” They replied: “That’s because they never gave us anything.” A young archivist went rummaging in the archives and came back with two sheets of paper. Betty kindly had these two sheets translated from German for us. The first was a dispatch from the Nice Gestapo to the Drancy Gestapo, which read: “Resume interrogation of the Jewess Rosenstock” – Odette’s maiden name. The second sheet was the reply from the Drancy Gestapo to the Nice Gestapo: “Too late, impossible to resume interrogation of the Jewess Rosenstock, she is already in the East.”
And the children – who will look after the children?
I will pass over my madness – truly, a moment of madness. I wanted to help her escape from Drancy. But when I got back, the bishop’s secretary said to me: “Monsignor Rémond wants to see you urgently.” I went up to his office; he looked embarrassed and would not look me in the eye. He said: “The net is closing in on us. Sylvie has been arrested. You are wanted; there is a price on your head. So listen, I have found you a hiding place in the hinterland of Nice – not for long, two or three weeks. And then you will come back.” For the first time since I had known this prelate, for the first time, I started to shout. “Monseigneur,” I said to him, “can the former chaplain of the 1914–18 war that you are ask a man like me to desert? Because that is what you are asking me to do! And the children – who will look after the children? Have you thought of that?” He got up with difficulty, took my arm, walked me to the door and said: “All we can do now is pray for you.” And as he said this, he put his hand on my head – exactly the same gesture my grandfather had made when, at 19, I had placed my finger on the mezuzah before leaving my ghetto and my family for ever. It was the moment when my grandfather said the blessing for departure.
And I found myself in the street. I did not know where to sleep. With the children – always the obsession with the children. The headmistress of a girls’ school said to me: “I can’t take you in, but I can let you sleep in a classroom if you like. I’ll lay something out for you, a rug on the floor, but I must ask you not to undress, because you have to be able to flee very quickly.” I accepted. I slept in a classroom, sometimes in one, sometimes in another. But I absolutely had to leave the school at half past six, when the cleaning women came in. I went out. I walked through the streets of Nice. Then I was told that this was dangerous for someone who was wanted and whose description was known – they called me “the man in the gabardine”. So I went up to the bishop’s residence again and saw his private secretary, Father Rostang, who is today Canon Rostang, sadly paralysed. He wrote to me not long ago. I said to him: “Father, I need the list of all the Masses, and the times of all the Masses in Nice, in the chapels and the churches.” He said: “That’s odd – why do you want that?” I told him I wanted to go to Mass between half past six and nine o’clock. He said, “Ah, well,” and gave me the list. And I began. Every morning at half past six I was in one chapel, then another, then a church. No practising Catholic, I can assure you, has ever attended so many Masses in so short a time!
We carried on. And when I say we were alone, it is not true. There was the chain of good people who took children, who knew what they were risking, who knew what they were exposing themselves to, and who said to us: “All right, give them to us!” In the institutions there were Gestapo raids. Don Bosco had 13 of our children; there was a Gestapo raid, and the father in charge said: “But I have never seen a Jew in my house” – he knew he was lying, since the ration cards were false. There was a woman Gestapo agent, the most despicable the Gestapo ever had – which is saying something – known as “Alice la Blonde”. She said: “Don’t bother, I can recognise Jews by their noses! Take me through the classrooms.” She pointed to twelve children: “Out, out, out!” Not one of these twelve children was Jewish! She took them away, and their families then had to bring the baptism certificates of the father, the mother and the grandfather. But we, for our part, had to rid Don Bosco immediately of our embarrassing placements. Things like that happened from time to time: a six-year-old would turn to his friend and say: “You know, my name isn’t Rocher, it’s Blumenfeld – it’s a secret, don’t tell anyone!” And the school would call us, we would rush over, and the child had to be moved in a hurry. That was our daily bread. That was what saving children meant. I do not want to dwell on it.
My husband was deported, my two daughters were deported, my son was deported; he was all I had left, and I was afraid I would not find him again.
Then came the radiant day of the Liberation. Now that was something! With La Sixième, I had requisitioned the Commissariat for Jewish Affairs and set up my office there. It was a stampede! A stampede of parents, of mothers who came to claim their children as quickly as possible; they could not wait. People of good will went everywhere – to Grasse, to Cannes, to Opio, to the mountains – and brought the children back. And I remember one mother – there were thirty people standing waiting – and I brought in a child of five and pushed him towards his mother. She took him in her arms, fell to her knees and hugged him almost to suffocation. And then she said nothing more; silence, in front of everyone. Then at one point she began to scream: “My husband was deported, my two daughters were deported, my son was deported; he was all I had left, and I was afraid I would not find him again.” A long silence. And then she raised her eyes to heaven and said: “Thank you, my God, thank you, my God!” She took her child and went on down the stairs, as in an ancient tragedy: “Thank you, my God!” I never found that woman again, I never found that child again. What has become of you?
And then one day, a little crumpled piece of paper, just like that, which I found in an envelope: Odette, alive, Bergen-Belsen. She had given it to someone, who had sent it to a friend. She was alive; that was what mattered. I carried on. She came back, and we tried to resume our work, because we did not want to return the children without giving them medical examinations. I set up a clinic with her. But that was now the business of the OSE.
What followed does not belong to us. I would rather answer the second question I have been asked for a few months. I told you that we kept silent. For fifty years we never talked about it to anyone, except in one interview in 1948. And then one day – I had just published a book about my ghetto – a journalist from Radio J who was interviewing me said: “I know you hid Jewish children during the war.” I think I answered: “Yes, that’s right!” And as chance – a miracle – would have it, a woman named Betty Kalusky Saville was listening; she heard, pricked up her ears and wrote to us. We met her and we loved her. We worked for her and with her; it can never be said enough, and we can never thank enough this woman, the Association des Enfants Cachés in Paris, Rivka, or the Hidden Children association in Jerusalem. Thanks to these associations, children find each other, children find those who hid them, and rescuers find those they saved. That, truly, was a grace for us. She asked us whether she could publish a list of the children we had hidden. We no longer had the whole list. Odette had index cards – 150, 200, I no longer remember – we gave them to her and she published them. We did not have much faith in it; to tell the truth, we did not believe in it at all.
What joy to find lost children again!
And against all expectations, we received letters and telephone calls from all over: from Haifa, from Tel Aviv, from Luxembourg, from France. It was always the same scenario. “Hello, this is Edith Stern, I’m calling from Haifa.” Then nothing. Sobs. “Speak!” “I can’t.” “Speak again, I’m here!” “I can’t!” It was always the same. We had found a child whose mother had entrusted him to Odette when he was three. His name was – and still is – Raphaël Michelson. I called him near Tel Aviv, I think. Impossible to get a word out of him. We insisted that he come to Paris. He works for a computer company. His company had sent him to America. On his way back from America, he stopped off in Paris. He came into our home. He kissed Odette, he kissed me, he sat down at the table; Odette served him. He had his fork in his hand. He looked at us like a madman. He could not eat. But what joy! What joy to find lost children again! I am not even speaking of Jeannette Zvita, the most faithful of the faithful, whom we had never lost sight of, or of Françoise Bram and Françoise Knopf, who never miss an occasion – Hanukkah, Yom Kippur, Purim, Passover, Rosh Hashanah – to give us news of their families and to write. I am not speaking of Julien Engel, who introduced himself to us one day, saying: “I have been looking for you for 45 years, and it was a chance meeting with a historian in Jerusalem that put me on your trail.”
You have nothing to thank us for, because you owe us nothing!
I am speaking of those whom we have found again thanks to the Hidden Children. I am thinking of you, André, of you, Gaby, of you, Armand, and of all the others. They bring us happiness, like a kind of seal showing that what we did was of some use. So, since we found these children again, the question that comes up most often is this: “How can we thank you?” The answer will be brief. “You have nothing to thank us for, because you owe us nothing! It is we who are in your debt. You gave us a lesson in dignity and courage. You have nothing to thank us for, because we belong to a generation of every utopia, every illusion, every act of cowardice. We were not able to protect you; we were not able to spare you these misfortunes. I belong to a generation that queued for hours at the doors of the Mutualité and the Salle Wagram for the honour and the joy of hearing André Malraux and Aragon, Vaillant-Couturier, Marcel Cachin, Jean Guéhenno, Léon Blum and Professor Langevin. And what did they all tell us? ‘Fascism shall not pass!’ And I went back to my little room in the Cité Universitaire reassured. ‘Fascism shall not pass!’ It did pass! And we know what it cost us! So please, do not thank us; you owe us nothing! But be careful. If you owe us nothing, you owe a great deal to others.”
What is a Hidden Child? It was a child in danger. It was a child who needed others. It was a child who might die. So I ask you, I beg you: look around you. Think of the children of Rwanda, the children of Somalia, the street children of Manila, the children of Chernobyl, the children of Sarajevo. They are hidden children! And you owe them something. So do something. And if you do not have the means to do something for them, then shout, scream; do not accept that, in this world, people are being killed a few hundred kilometres from your home.
Annette Wieviorka has just said that history nourishes memory, and vice versa. The role of history is enormous, and a book like Annette Wieviorka’s helped me enormously to understand what had happened. There is a sentence by Paul Valéry that keeps running through my head, which I read when I was twenty, in a book called “Regards sur le monde actuel” (Reflections on the World Today). This sentence says, word for word: “The future in itself has no image; it is the past that gives it the means to be thought. Thanks to historians, who show us the past, we can form an idea of what the future will be; we can think about the future.” And thinking about the future today is a very arduous, very difficult and not very exhilarating task.
Talk to your children, to your grandchildren. Tell them that there was a time when a Jew was worth 50 francs.
I will tell you, without wanting to play Cassandra: everything could start again. Listen to certain speeches, read a certain press. “Je suis partout”, “Gringoire”, “La Gerbe”, the “Pariser Zeitung” are back. So I beg you, be watchmen – watchmen and awakeners. Talk to your children, to your grandchildren. Tell them that there was a time when a Jew was worth 50 francs. Because that is how it was! La Sixième had got hold of a woman’s notebook; it was her account book. I saw that notebook with my own eyes! It said: “Tuesday, 4 Jews, 250 francs; Wednesday, 6 Jews, 300 francs!” You must tell those around you that there was a time when a Jew was not worth much. And then, I beg you, do not turn the other cheek any more. For two thousand years we have turned the other cheek.
Finally, I would like to ask you to spare a thought. It is my way of saying Kaddish. A thought for the children we could not save, did not know how to save, should have saved, if there had been more of us. But when I asked the leading figures of the Jewish community of Nice to prepare something, they looked at me with suspicion. A community leader, of course, is meant to sit on the Consistory, from father to son – but not to go and save children! So, you understand, we should spare a thought for those we could not save. And in particular the Gartner children, aged six and eight, whom we had entrusted to a priest, a Belgian priest in a little village called Séranon. The priest had taken these children, and he was careless enough to say in his village that he had hidden Jews. Two days later, the Jews were arrested and deported. I cannot forget them. I cannot forget their father, who came back from Auschwitz to ask me for his children. I did not have the courage to tell him, but he understood at once. Listen carefully to where holiness can be found. This man, who had just learnt that he would not see his children again, thanked me for what I had done for the other children!
I am afraid of tomorrow. I am afraid of what is going to happen. For us, the hour will soon strike. Georges Garel’s team has gone. Many others who saved children have gone. Soon all of us, one by one, will follow them. And you will remain, the living witnesses – you, your children, your grandchildren. Speak, shout, scream! Do not leave the field to the Holocaust deniers. One morning, listening to the radio, I learnt that Odette had not been deported, that her mother had not been gassed, that her sister had not been gassed, that I had not hidden my children, that nothing had happened, that it was all the fantasies of Jews! And it will go on even more! You know it.
What do I have left? If I knew how to pray, I would pray night and day that your children and grandchildren do not suffer the fate of the Gartner children. But since the day I witnessed the slaughter of that Jewish woman on the Promenade des Anglais, I have not been on good terms with God. But what is a prayer? It can be a cry of revolt; it can be a cry of hope. Here I am going to cry out in hope. Charles Péguy has God say: “What surprises me most is hope!” Well, it is because you are here – you, Hidden Children of the Marcel network and of the other networks; because I have heard these ladies talk about what they did. I still have a little hope. That little hope which, as Charles Péguy also said, is invincible, immortal and impossible to extinguish.
Au revoir, les enfants! (Goodbye, children!)
Moussa Abadi
Palais du Luxembourg, May 21, 1995
Hidden Children conference