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Les Enfants et Amis AbadiPreserving the memory of Odette and Moussa Abadi and keeping alive the memory of the Shoah

Exhibition “Hidden children” at the library in Saint-Martin-d’Auxigny (Cher)

November 6, 2009

The beginnings of the Shoah

January 30, 1933: Adolf Hitler is appointed Chancellor by Marshal von Hindenburg. The Nazis seek to create a “Judenrein” Germany (cleansed of Jews) by making life impossible for the 600,000 German Jews, to the point of forcing some of them into exile.

September 15, 1935: the Nuremberg Laws are enacted (boycott of businesses, removal of civil and social rights, exclusion from certain professions, ban on attending school, etc.). Hitler justifies these laws by claiming that they should stabilise relations between “Jews” and “Aryans”…

Kristallnacht

This name is given to the violent pogrom that took place on November 9 and 10, 1938 throughout Germany and in the recently annexed territories (Austria and the Sudetenland). It was presented as a spontaneous outburst of popular anger and as a so-called response to the murder of the diplomat Ernst vom Rath, committed in Paris on November 7, 1938 by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish Jew. It was also the first wave of arrests: 20,000 to 30,000 Jews were arrested and deported to the existing concentration camps (Dachau, Sachsenhausen).

Following the antisemitic violence, more than 10,000 children left for England, Belgium, the Netherlands, France…

October 1940: first internments of Jewish children in France (Gurs…)

January 20, 1942: the Final Solution is drawn up at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, with the aim of exterminating the Jews of Europe.

The Évian Conference: what was to be done with the Jews in 1938?

On the initiative of the President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was responding to growing political pressure, the Évian Conference was held from July 6 to 13, 1938 to decide the fate of the Jewish refugees (German and Austrian).

The meeting ended in failure, despite the creation of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (ICR).

With great irony, the German government declared: “It is astonishing that foreign countries criticise Germany for its treatment of the Jews, when none of them is willing to open its doors to them.” Subsequently, the violent pogroms of Kristallnacht did nothing to change the position of the Americans, who remained reluctant to take in Jewish refugees.

The persecution of the Jews could begin.

Geographical landmarks in France

Established by the Franco-German armistice agreement signed on June 22, 1940 at Rethondes, the division of French territory came into effect on June 25. Under this division, there were:

From exclusion to deportation: the fate of Jewish children worsens

The 1941 round-ups of foreign Jews (by “green ticket” summons and round-ups in the arrondissements of Paris).

June 8, 1942: the yellow star is made compulsory, a discriminatory measure from which children over the age of six are not exempt. It was not imposed in the southern zone.

July 16 and 17, 1942: the Vel d’Hiv round-up in Paris, targeting foreign Jews, carried out by the French police. For the first time, women (5,802) and children (4,051) were arrested. The children were torn from their mothers (who were deported) and then abandoned in camps before being deported to Auschwitz. None came back.

August 26, 1942: the Vichy government, through the French Milice, handed over to the Gestapo 10,000 foreign (so-called stateless) Jews living in the unoccupied zone. It first handed over the Jews interned in French camps, then those who had been enrolled in the Foreign Workers’ Groups. Vichy had no intention of keeping Jewish children in France.

The first Jewish rescue networks are set up

Public opinion shifts, and chains of solidarity grow stronger.

The first organisations to help the children were the EIF, the OSE and the Comité Amelot. They often operated behind the screen of the UGIF. The UGIF (Union Générale des Israélites de France) was a body created by a French law of November 29, 1941 at the request of the German army. Its primary mission was to represent the Jews before the public authorities. All Jews in France were obliged to join it. Many Jewish associations were dissolved.

The Éclaireurs Israélites de France (EIF – French Jewish Scouts)

A Jewish scout movement, founded by Robert Gamzon (“Castor”). In September 1942, the “Sixième” was created: a clandestine organisation for security, self-defence, hiding
and the forging of false papers. This section saved young Jews.

The Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE – Children’s Aid Society)

Founded in Russia in 1912, it moved to Berlin in 1923 (Albert Einstein was its president), then to Paris in 1933.

From February 1941: 5,000 children of foreign Jews were interned in the camps of the southern zone, particularly Rivesaltes and Gurs.

The first releases of children took place in April 1941. Andrée Salomon organised the service that got the children out of the camps. Vivette Samuel, a volunteer social worker, worked inside the camps; Sabine Zlatin worked from outside. From 1942, the children were no longer safe in the OSE homes, which risked becoming traps.

The watchword was: “Let us save the children and disperse them”

Within the OSE, the Garel Circuit:

From August 1942: Doctor Joseph Weil persuaded Georges Garel (a Lyon resister) to set up a clandestine network for children at risk of deportation. The Garel network became operational in early 1943 in the Toulouse region. Each region had a leader who maintained the link between central headquarters and the departments.

As a rule, children were removed from the homes after changing their identities. They were then entrusted to compartmentalised departmental teams. The arrest of Alain Mossé (former chief of staff of the Prefect of Savoie) forced the OSE to go fully underground in March 1944. The tragedy of Izieu came a month later.

The rescue of Jewish children by the OSE is one of the most important aspects of the Jewish Resistance against the Vichy government and the German occupation.

The Comité Amelot

Its beginnings: the Colonie Scolaire, at 36 rue Amelot in Paris, was founded in 1926 by David Rapoport and Juda Jacoubovitch.

Its mission was to create supplementary schools for the families of Jewish immigrants. In 1930 it set up a medical service offering free consultations, which in 1933 became the “La Mère et l’Enfant” (Mother and Child) clinic. During the Occupation, the leaders of various movements within the Federation of Jewish Societies of France (FSJF) decided to join forces to help Jewish émigrés and set up a committee based in the premises of the “Colonie Scolaire” at 36 rue Amelot in Paris – hence its name, the “Comité Amelot”.

In September 1940, David Rapoport joined the committee. He very quickly became its driving force. Out of caution, he insisted that the committee’s leadership remain unknown to the public and the authorities. Thus, under the label of the Colonie Scolaire and its clinic, “La Mère et l’Enfant”, the Comité Amelot operated openly and could cover clandestine activity. This service was the main source of help for Jewish émigrés at the start of the persecution.

At the end of 1942, a number of the Committee’s leaders were arrested and then deported, including David Rapoport, who died of exhaustion at Buna-Monowitz on July 2, 1944.

The Marcel network

The Marcel network was created at the beginning of 1943 by Moussa Abadi and Odette Rosenstock. Both joined the Resistance in Nice and found there the cause for which they would risk their lives: rescuing children.

In September 1943, after the armistice between Italy and the Allies, the Germans invaded the Alpes-Maritimes and the Jews were trapped. Moussa Abadi persuaded Monseigneur Rémond (Bishop of Nice) to help him save the Jewish children. The bishop opened the Catholic boarding schools of the diocese and appointed Moussa Abadi inspector of Catholic education for the diocese of Nice, and Odette Rosenstock social worker.

Under the name of Monsieur Marcel, Moussa Abadi became an expert in “genuine false identity cards” and “genuine false ration cards”: he produced more than a thousand of them. The Marcel network saved the lives of 527 children.

Other rescue networks

Rescuing the children

In the occupied zone: flight

Parents hid their children with them or on their own, depending on their means or connections, locally, in the provinces or in the free zone. At the same time, Jewish, Catholic, Protestant and secular associations took part in the rescue.

In the free zone

Children were taken in by existing children’s homes, which served as refuges when they left the camps. Protestant and Catholic religious institutions took part in this, as did private individuals (peasants, foster families,
nannies…).

New rescue networks were created. Escapes abroad were organised. Some children were unsettled by the changes of identity, of religious practice, of place from one hiding place to another. Several people who took part in rescuing children were arrested, interned and deported.

Children’s lives

In Sagonne (Cher), little Charles Bagès was taken in by the blacksmith Danneman and sent to school among young French children, while his parents had been rounded up in Paris and deported.

In Sury-près-Léré (Cher), Régine Hodara, born on March 27, 1936, was entrusted to Hermine Lasne. Her mother had been arrested. She was baptised and sent to the village school.

Near Saint-Amand (Cher), Richard Rein, born in Orléans on May 31, 1941, was hidden in a slaughterhouse – no doubt by his parents, who belonged to the Combat movement.

In Nice (Alpes-Maritimes), after the Germans arrived in September 1943, the Szteinsznaider family was split up: the parents on one side, their four children taken in charge by the Marcel network. Joseph Szteinsznaider, born in Paris on February 26, 1937, who became Joseph Garnier, was hidden in a convent, then with peasants, and finally in a preventorium in Grasse.

Lazare Szteinsznaider, born in 1927 in Paris (who became Enault), was placed at the Don Bosco Institute in Nice, then in Séranon, where he was arrested after being denounced and then deported (convoy 73). He died on May 20, 1944 in Kaunas (Lithuania).

After the Liberation, the OSE took charge of Eva Szteinsznaider (hidden in Chambéry), Dolly (placed in the Poor Clares’ boarding school) and Joseph. The three children became wards of the nation.

The Righteous

This title was created in 1963 by the State of Israel. It honours non-Jews who risked their lives to help Jews during the Second World War. Their names are inscribed at the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem.

In France, the names of those recognised as “Righteous” are engraved on the “Wall of the Righteous” at the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris.

 Medal of the Righteous

In January 2007, Jacques Chirac, President of the French Republic, paid solemn tribute to the “Righteous of France” (3,074 to date) and unveiled a plaque in the crypt of the Panthéon in Paris which reads: “…Braving the risks they ran, the Righteous embodied the honour of France and its values of justice, tolerance and humanity”

At the Liberation

The hidden children, some of them orphans, were taken in by children’s homes, Jewish or not. As part of family reunification, various bodies tried to find the children’s families. Some children were adopted by families in France or abroad.

The Jewish organisations, with financial support from the JOINT and later from the French State, opened children’s homes. For these children, it was a return to life without losing their Jewish identity. Secular charities and state orphanages also gave them an education and a trade.

Conclusion

Despite the active collaboration of Marshal Pétain’s regime with the Nazis, the proportion of children who survived in France was higher than in most other countries. It is estimated that 10,000 children were saved by Jewish networks – 4,000 in the northern zone and 6,000 in the southern zone. 50,000 children were saved thanks to their parents or those around them.

The help of non-Jewish charities, secular or religious, of foster families in town and country, and the mobilisation of those we now call “the Righteous” explain the effectiveness of a network. In this way several thousand children were sheltered in France, not counting those sent to the United States, Switzerland or Palestine, via Spain, etc.

The main reasons why so many children were saved:

Further reading

Here is a selection of books on the fate and rescue of Jewish children in France during the war.

Films and documentaries

Sabine and Joseph warmly thank all the witnesses and participants in this evening of testimonies.