Report on the ceremony awarding the Righteous medal to Pastor Pierre Gagnier and his wife Hélène
January 18, 2012
Speech by Nelly Dohan (eldest daughter of Ernest and Lily Dohan)
Madam Mayor,
Councillors,
Representative of the Embassy of Israel in France,
Dear friends,
I am the eldest of the three Dohan children. It is with great emotion that we come to say a few words in tribute to the memory of Pierre Gagnier and his wife.
I will simply tell you the circumstances in which our parents came to know Pastor and Madame Pierre GAGNIER, who came to their aid shortly after I was born.
Our parents, Ernest DOHAN, born in Vienna, Austria, in 1909, and Lily, born in Prague in 1910, both of whom had lost their fathers, left Czechoslovakia in 1939 to try to reach England and were stranded in Boulogne-sur-Mer during the “Phoney War” and then the invasion of France. Their relatives who had stayed in Prague or Vienna were deported and murdered.
They managed to reach the southern zone and lived in Nice among thousands of other refugees, French and foreign, with false papers. Nice, under Italian occupation, did not experience the round-ups carried out elsewhere in France.
But after the landing in Sicily, Mussolini was removed from power at the end of July 1943 and the Germans occupied the County of Nice at the beginning of August. The fairly “quiet” period of the Italian occupation was followed by the arrival of the Germans and the round-ups.
I was born in Nice on August 7, 1943, in a discreet private clinic. The timing was really not ideal.
To escape this hostile environment, our parents were lucky enough to speak French and to know how the administration worked, as our mother had been employed in the spring and summer of 1940 at the sub-prefecture of Boulogne-sur-Mer as an interpreter, first French–English and then, unfortunately, French–German. So they made absolutely sure they were never registered, constantly changing hotels or lodgings and going out only at the “authorities’” lunchtime.
But the birth of their daughter made them much less mobile and easier to detect, as the poorly fed baby often cried.
They learnt from other refugees of the existence of the DUBOUCHAGE Committee and went to the Reformed church on boulevard DUBOUCHAGE to have false papers made. There they met Monsieur ATGER and then Pastor GAGNIER, who was working hard to help Jewish refugees.
Knowing the risks of staying in Nice, Pastor GAGNIER offered to lend our parents an empty house belonging to his wife, née AUBANEL, in the southern Cévennes, in a small town in the Gard, SAUVE, at no. 5 Grande Rue. The neighbours called it the “AUBANEL house”.
In practice, our parents had neither the money nor the passes to get to SAUVE, and it was not until February 1944, when the evacuation of refugees from the coastal zone was ordered for fear of an Allied landing, that they were able to obtain passes and reach the Gard. During this very dangerous journey, they were once again saved from a round-up at Nîmes station by an anonymous railwayman on March 3, 1944; the town had been sealed off the day before, when 15 hostages were hanged following an attack by the LASALLE maquis.
When they reached SAUVE, the GAGNIERs’ relatives, warned by a letter from the pastor, gave them the key to this huge house – since sold by the family and turned into a holiday cottage – and helped them settle in discreetly, finding our father work as a woodcutter. The people of SAUVE, mostly Protestants who remembered the persecutions under Louis XIV, showed great solidarity and took them with them to the maquis when, in July 1944, a German column heading north towards Normandy suffered losses in an attack by resistance fighters nearby and threatened to take hostages in the village.
Until their deaths, our parents remained close friends with the people they had known in the village during the war. We remember going back there as children around 1960 and sleeping in that far-too-big, unheatable, freezing house.
My brother, researching the origins of this large 18th-century house of a local notable, found a Monsieur Étienne AUBANEL, a physician in the diocese of Uzès, who took part in drafting the cahiers de doléances (lists of grievances) of 1789, and whose sister had married Jean MASSIP on April 15, 1756 in SOMMIÈRES. And the MASSIP family were also among the friends who helped our parents in SAUVE.
Our parents left SAUVE at the Liberation and kept in touch with the friends they had made there, in particular Étienne and Jeanne BRUN, their neighbours. Étienne was a carpenter. As our father, at the age of 90, reminded us: they had understood what really mattered; as early as 1943, they had!
In 1968, having testified to YAD VASHEM on behalf of Émile CARPENTIER, a railwayman in the Resistance and mayor of OUTREAU in the Pas-de-Calais, who helped them leave the forbidden military zone of the Pas-de-Calais in the autumn of 1940, our parents asked Pastor GAGNIER whether he would like them to testify about what he had done. He replied that he did not wish them to.
Unaware of this, one of my brothers, surprised not to see his name on the Wall of the Righteous, took the initiative and prepared a file for YAD VASHEM, thinking that if Pastor GAGNIER and his wife had helped hundreds of unfortunate people among the thousands hunted down in Nice, it was quite possible that only a few had survived. It was therefore their duty, and that of their children, to confirm the testimony the pastor gave in 1945, kept at the Mémorial de la Shoah – he who dared to go to the Hôtel EXCELSIOR, the Gestapo headquarters, to demand the release of prisoners – to show that his efforts were not all in vain, and to allow such exceptional conduct and extraordinary courage to be honoured.
Nelly Dohan