Inauguration of the Fresco in tribute to the OSE rescuers
May 25, 2010
Speech by Katy Hazan
Good morning, everyone; good morning to the great OSE family; good morning to those who are here, and also to those who are absent.
The fresco we are inaugurating is the result of long work that took almost 4 years. It began as an initiative of the friends’ association, and in particular of Armand Bulwa, the guardian of memory: to inscribe the names of the OSE rescuers. No sooner said than done: a small group set to work to decide whose names should be included; we arrived at 160 names and imagined a tree of rescue, then a work of art, then the idea of a competition.
And then, and then, the research continued; we widened it to all the men and women who were in the organisation during the war, then to all those who helped the OSE in its rescue work. We arrived at 400 names, and we have surely forgotten some, so we opted for a large illustrated fresco on which names can be changed and added.
I would have liked to mention them all, for every name smiles at us. They are anonymous people, great figures, activists, idealists, nobodies, Russians, Alsatians, French Israelites, foreigners with unpronounceable names, doctors, young girls, Jews and non-Jews who took part in rescuing thousands of children and adults.
So let us begin by greeting those who are still alive: Lily Garel, Gaby Cohen (our Niny), Dora Werzberg, Emma Lederer, Madeleine Meyer, Renée Ortin, Dora Leidervager, Myriam Greisalmer, Frida Wattenberg, Théodore Samet and our eldest, Georges Loinger.
The history of the OSE is a great saga that began in 1912, whose unchanging principle is to be wherever Jewish populations are in distress.
I cannot resist mentioning names, especially as I know that many of their relatives are here.
A few great figures of this saga in France: Joseph Weill, the prophet; Andrée Salomon, the grande dame of the OSE, whose memoirs we are at last going to publish with the help of her nephew Georges Weill and her son Jean; Georges Garel, known as “Gris”, brought to the OSE by his brother-in-law Charles Lederman, and whose wife Lily will say a few words before unveiling the fresco; Georges Loinger, the man of the borders.
Allow me to introduce a woman less well known to the general public, Dr Valentine Cremer. She followed the OSE through all its wanderings from St Petersburg to Paris by way of Berlin. She took part in the mobile columns that looked after the thousands of displaced Jews during the First World War; she was at the side of Dr Eugène Minkowski in Paris under the Occupation, joined the leadership in Montpellier, then in Chambéry; and finally it was she who wrote the first medical report on the condition of the Jews of North Africa, after a stay there in 1946.
The OSE is also so many family sagas around the rescue of children, each of which could be the subject of a film or a serialised novel:
The Loinger saga: Emma, involved in the children’s homes from 1939; Fanny, in charge of a sector of the Garel network; Georges at the border; Simon Mangel at Chabannes; Dora Wersberg, a volunteer resident at Rivesaltes and Gurs – each discovering after the war what the other had been doing.
The Samuels, Vivette and Julien, who met at the heart of the operation and married at the Le Couret home in 1942, writing history into the future. And then, cherries to announce that Julien and Jacques Salon had jumped from the train taking them to Drancy after their arrest in Lyon.
With them in the Limoges office, Pierre Dreyfus, known as Dutertre, a dashing young man from Chambéry, sent away by the OSE’s general secretary, Joseph Millner, because he played too much poker with his son! Which saved his life.
The Malkin-Frenkels: Isa, the resident doctor in various camps, above all Agde, who later escorted the Buchenwald children to Palestine, including little Meir Lau; Henriette, director of children’s homes; and Jeanne, involved in the Garel circuit.
Finally the Cogans, two brothers at the OSE: Elisée, the doctor who with Jacques Bloch kept the ever-growing number of children’s homes running; and Joseph, arrested with his two young children at the Les Morelles home in Broût-Vernet.
The OSE is a health and social organisation: we counted more than thirty doctors. They were among the leaders; each home had its own; and we have found doctors’ reports with the children’s growth charts up to the end of 1943, addressed to the chief medical officer Gaston Lévy, whose memoirs we have published. Every town with Jewish refugees had an OSE medical and social centre, where people were treated, escape routes were sought and even false papers were made. The last one, in Nice, run by Dr Marie Isserlis and by Odette Rosenstock, the future Madame Abadi, suffered a Gestapo raid, which her son Georges, who is here today and who also jumped from the train to Drancy, could tell you about.
But it was in Paris, right under Dannecker’s nose, that the clinic in the rue des Francs-Bourgeois, guarded by the Lobermanns, operated with no fewer than 10 doctors of different specialities; I would like to mention Drs Lydie Bronstein, Irène Opollon and Salek Goldberg, whose families I believe are among us; while the small Paris team revolved around Professor Eugène Minkowski, Hélène Matorine and Enéa Averbouh. So many tragedies are recorded in the diary the latter wrote at the time: women alone, ill or in absolute distress, not knowing what to do with their children; abandoned old people waiting for help from the OSE.
In this deadly game of cat and mouse, the OSE followed the movements of the hunted Jews: it was present in the internment camps of the southern zone alongside the rabbi-chaplains, and Andrée Salomon worked hand in hand with Chief Rabbi René Hirschler and Henri Schilli.
Among us is one of Andrée Salomon’s many children, Paula Koiran, who has dedicated to her the memoirs that are coming out in a few days, the rights to which she has given to the OSE.
You will see on the fresco that it is of course in the 14 OSE children’s homes that there are the most names – 182 exactly – from the gardener and the linen maid to the director and the teachers, such as the Paillassou sisters who, at Chabannes, warned Félix Chevrier that a round-up was imminent.
It was because young people over 15 were threatened with deportation that Joseph Weill, after Vénissieux, asked Georges Garel to set up his clandestine network: 57 people, the vast majority of them very young women who had been “Aryanised”, as the jargon of the time put it, or had become “non-specific”, including a dozen non-Jews – no doubt an underestimate. Allow me to mention two Righteous of the OSE, Pauline Gaudefroy and Simone Cocqué-Stolzé. I hope the OSE will be able to put together a file for René Borel, the loyal colleague whose flat in Lyon was a hub until the very last days.
The Garel network – there would be so much to say! Circuit A, circuit B, Germaine Masour in Limoges, all the escorts who criss-crossed France on foot or by bicycle: Huguette Wahl, Nicole Weil-Salon, Madeleine Dreyfus, Denise Vormus, Charlotte Rosenbaum-Helmann – arrested three times, by the maquisards, the Milice and the Gestapo, and saved three times, notably by Pierre Dreyfus of the Limoges office. We plan to publish, with the FMS, the memoirs of Georges Garel, with contributions from local historians, to produce a detailed organisation chart of the clandestine circuit in each of the major regions where it operated.
For besides the medical and social centres, every large town had an OSE branch – unfortunately an obvious target for Gestapo raids. That is where most arrests took place, far more than in the Garel circuit, which its creator made remarkably secure.
On February 7, 1944, the Chambéry Gestapo came to arrest the whole office of the UGIF’s 3rd health directorate – 8 people at once, including Alain Mossé, former secretary of the Isère prefecture, and Emeric Fiser, an educator from Montintin who had just come back from the Swiss border, where he had taken some children, and who happened to be there. Thanks to the presence of mind of Julius Abrahamer, whose son is among us, one of the secretaries was able to escape. Before leaving for Drancy, Alain Mossé had time to send a coded telegram, received by Robert Job, then director of Poulouzat, urging the OSE to close all its structures immediately, because its activities were known to Alois Brunner. This was done, except at Izieu and Chaumont. Sadly, we know what followed.
33 members of the OSE died in deportation or were shot by the Milice. I would simply like to mention those who came back: Madeleine Dreyfus, who escorted children from Lyon to Le Chambon-sur-Lignon; Laja Feldblum, a carer at the Izieu home; Dr Jules Hofstein of Toulouse; Dr Odette Rosenstock of Nice; and Robert Weill, a great scholar at the Broût-Vernet home.
That is what this fresco of names tells, together with the accompanying documents you will discover in a moment, which form the foundations of today’s OSE.
Names inscribed on a wall live as long as we are there to recall them. It is time to make their story known – those of the OSE, the EIF, the MJS, the Marcel and André networks, the rabbi-chaplains, all those Jews who mobilised to save other Jews. It is also time – yes, high time – to honour the living as “Jewish Righteous”: those who for so long were refused the title of resisters, those who after the war were pointed at for their involvement in the UGIF, those who never asked for anything. Jewish Righteous, guardians of life, Tzaddikim: it is time to find them a place in our pantheon.
Before reading part of the message from Philippe Borel in Montreal, I would like to thank J.F. Guthmann and Roger Fajzylberg for their trust; my loyal colleague Dominique Rotermund; Bernard Roux-Zes for his availability; the Friends’ Associations of Former OSE members in France and America; and of course the FMS.
Here is a message from Philippe Borel in Montreal, received this morning:
“For my father, the OSE was THE great story of his life. It was a world he loved deeply, deeply. A wealth of cultures, open-mindedness, intelligence, with humour never very far away, simplicity, lack of pretension: there he had found his true family – the family of the heart and of the mind. The OSE would always be faithful to him; the founders, the old hands, would always be there for him, in his hard times as a wretched immigrant in the Toronto ghetto just after the war, right up to his end, which was happy and serene: his OSE friends never abandoned him.
And for me? All these names, all these names, are presences I carry within me. Some images are a little blurred, but the intensity of their presence is not. Lazare Gurvic, who always pulled my ear when he saw me; Joseph Millner, who gave me so many of his books, his fine prize books (he must have been a formidable top pupil: his first prizes were many); Georges Garel and his eternal cigarette… Alain Mossé, discreet and refined, who gave me chocolates when he came to the flat in Chambéry… and Jenny, and Jacques, and, and, and……
Montpellier, Vic-sur-Cère, Chambéry, Chabannes, Lyon: the little boy I carry within me has not forgotten. They are not simply names or places: they are life, they are people – courageous, simple, fighting evil at the risk of their lives, sometimes losing those lives, but losing them with honour.
Later, after the war, I spent a year in Paris, a milestone in my professional life. The Jobs welcomed me almost like a son. Madame Job was a sumptuous cook. Danielle was my age: Danielle, radiant; Danielle, enthusiastic before beauty: the two of us shared wonderful moments.
And time passes…… but the memories remain, tragic and often radiant, for hope is always radiant: the OSE, in the storm, never lost that hope, and it was always radiant!”
Thank you