Meeting between the Lycée Morvan and the Marcel network
September 14, 2017
On Wednesday, June 7, Jeannette Wolgust and Andrée Karsenti went to meet the pupils of the Cours Morvan to share their story as hidden children and, more generally, the story of the Marcel network. Their hosts share their account of the occasion.
On Wednesday, June 7, 2017, Jeannette Wolgust and Andrée Poch-Karsenti did us the honour of visiting the Lycée Morvan to share with us their singular and painful experience as children hidden by the Marcel network during the Shoah.
The meeting was rich and intense, and we strongly felt the emotion behind each of their words. We were very lucky, because Jeannette hardly gives talks any more. The return of memories from that terrible time brings on a psychological and emotional vulnerability that Jeannette finds harder and harder to overcome. However, since the Lycée Morvan and Jeannette had shared a fine experience before, she agreed to come back to us to recall her painful memories.
We first met Jeannette at the 2008 Resistance competition organised by Aude de Saint-Loup and Annie Carcaillon. The theme then was to pay official tribute to Dr Odette Abadi, who was the school doctor at the Collège and Lycée Morvan from 1978 to 1994.
Astonishingly, Odette never spoke of the fact that she was co-founder of the Marcel network in Nice, which saved 527 Jewish children from Nazi barbarity and the Vichy laws – among them Jeannette Wolgust and Andrée Poch Karsenti. Odette survived the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen camps. At the official tribute to Odette Abadi in 2008, a plaque was put up on the wall of our school on Friday, January 11 in the presence of the pupils, the teaching and educational staff and the Abadi children – that is, the children hidden and saved by the Marcel network. An exhibition was also held at the town hall of the 9th arrondissement of Paris.
Jeannette Wolgust began by telling us how hard it had been for her to tell her story. It was too painful; the words would not come out. But it was necessary to become a witness to counter the revisionist theories.
Jeannette, a hidden child during the Shoah, escaped murderous persecution and extermination. Like many hidden Jewish children, she was separated from her parents and her little brother. Overnight she had to give up her Jewish identity and keep quiet about her name, which she took back after the war.
She went on to tell us about what she calls her luck, her lucky star. During the Vel d’Hiv round-up, the French police did not arrest her because they did not want to be burdened with a woman and her two children. Jeannette Swinta, as she was then, was a young teenager of 14. She was hidden under the name of Jeanne Moreau in Grasse, near Nice, through the doctor Odette Rosenstock, the future Madame Abadi, who was to be a sort of guardian angel to her.
We appreciated Jeannette’s testimony, a story that ends well. She and her brother found their parents again after the war. Then we felt great emotion when Jeannette took her Star of David out of her pocket and passed it from pupil to pupil.
Moreover, through her account we felt the unconditional love and deep gratitude of Jeannette Wolgust and Andrée Poch Karsenti for the Abadi couple. Through their association, “Les Enfants et Amis Abadi”, they have devoted most of their lives to making known the heroic deeds of Odette and Moussa Abadi, two “exceptional people” who never said a word about their courageous commitment.
Andrée Karsenti spoke little, being more reserved. She was only a very little girl during the Shoah, so her memories are particularly hazy. Yet her life was saved because when her parents were arrested at home, she was at the neighbours’. Sadly, Andrée never saw her parents again; they died in deportation. She too was hidden throughout the war by Odette and Moussa Abadi’s Marcel network.
We will take two major lessons from this meeting: the faith in life and the unconditional optimism of these two witnesses. And we understand very well that we are now the necessary relays of this passing-on.