3rd Shoah Generations Forum: “Laughter through tears”
June 1, 2024
Report by Andrée Poch-Karsenti
The 3rd “Shoah Generations” Forum was held from May 18 to 20, 2024.
Odette and Moussa were powerfully present at this third Forum. Wonderful moments of sharing and emotion, and workshops each more interesting than the last.
On Saturday, May 18, at the Collège François Couperin, many people wandered among the information stands of all the associations. Ours was not to be outdone. The four panels telling the story of the Marcel network were on display under the attentive eyes of Françoise and Jean-Marc Gagnier, who had come to lend a hand welcoming interested visitors.
The third Forum was officially opened in the presence of the President of the Mémorial de la Shoah, Éric de Rothschild, and its Director, Jacques Fredj, the Mayor of Paris Centre, Ariel Weil, and the guest of honour, Pierre-François Veil, President of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah.
Off to a good start, the Forum’s first big workshop had a facilitator full of humour: Jo Kastersztein, joined by Adam Biro and Michel Wieviorka to discuss the chosen theme: “Jewish humour – what place does it have in passing things on?”
After the laughter came a dinner interlude, and the evening ended with the storyteller Muriel Bloch, accompanied by Yael Miller on vocals and keyboard, in “Tell me a story”.
On Sunday, May 19, although I had volunteered to welcome the public, I took part in a fascinating workshop entitled “Rescuers and rescued, from one generation to the next: what are our ties?”, led by Fabienne Renard, a doctor of political science based in Geneva. Also taking part were Jeannette Cookie Fischer of the Sousa Mendes Foundation (2nd generation) and Gérald Mendes (3rd generation, grandson of Sousa Mendes), who told us the fascinating story of Sousa Mendes, Portuguese consul in Bordeaux in June 1940. Disobeying Salazar, he saved several tens of thousands of people, most of them Jewish, by issuing them visas for Portugal. For issuing more than 30,000 visas, Sousa Mendes was dismissed from his post, brought before a disciplinary board and stripped of all his rights. He died in poverty in 1954, far from his children and his family, who fought for his rehabilitation. This came in 1986, and Sousa Mendes was decorated posthumously by Mário Soares. The Yad Vashem Memorial in Israel had recognised him as “Righteous Among the Nations” in 1966.
There was also Luc Zbinden (3rd generation), the grandson of a rescuer whose story is woven like a patchwork. Several years ago he discovered that his grandfather, pastor of the Free Evangelical Church of Saint-Jean-du-Gard in the Cévennes, had protected a Jewish family during the Second World War. Since then Luc Zbinden has turned investigator – and it has been going on for fifteen years! He found the widow of Peter Heller (who lives in the USA), the little boy of that family of whom his grandfather had grown fond, as well as a cousin who lives in the Paris region. A large part of the family died in the camps. Luc Zbinden and this cousin applied for the Medal of the Righteous. I did not note down exactly what this witness said about the impact of his family discovery, so I looked on the Internet for these few sentences, which I copy here:
Luc Zbinden is reconnecting with the Jewish or biblical roots of his evangelical faith. Rediscovering this culture, he notes, “has been a refreshment, a rising of sap in the way I live my evangelical faith, bringing it colour and depth.” He is rediscovering the Jewishness of Jesus, but also the notion of “kavanah” – awareness of God’s presence during prayer – and the importance of an attitude of blessing (“brachot”) and gratitude – “seeing the glass as half full rather than half empty”.
And then there was me! And I told my story: the Rous family – Jean, who had lost a limb in the 1914 war, and his wife Jeanne – who, from behind their closed shutters in the building opposite, witnessed the arrest of my parents and of my father’s sister. They hid me in their little house in Annot, in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, with their son Jacky as my playmate: I was three. I knew nothing of these facts until the day my brother took me to the rue Niepce in Nice to show me the building where we had lived, and then took me across the street. Two floors up, I became reacquainted with my first rescuers, who were recognised as Righteous Among the Nations. They too told me their story: the resisters shot in the village square, their fears, and my return to Nice, “to the Dubouchage”, the meeting place of the Jewish refugees… where they entrusted me to my other rescuers, those two young people who “did not want to watch the procession go by” and had built their own Resistance.
Righteous in their commitment, without any diploma or recognition from the State of Israel: Odette Rosenstock and Moussa Abadi (both hunted Jews) created the Marcel network with the help of the humanity of Monseigneur Rémond, Bishop of Nice, of Pastor Pierre Gagnier and his wife, and of Pastor Evrard, his wife and their four children, who escorted the hunted: all recognised as Righteous Among the Nations.
They saved 527 children.
Thinking back to the title of this workshop, I would add that I have kept in touch with the Rous family, and that I am still in contact with Jacky today.
I was lucky enough to spend time with Moussa and Odette for a few years before they died: we loved each other.
I would round off by adding that I know a part – and not the least – of the Gagnier family: the son of the pastor of that name, Jean-Marc, and his wife Françoise are members of our association, “Les Enfants et Amis Abadi”, and their son Emmanuel is the webmaster of our website.
They are not directly my rescuers, but they carry and pass on the rescue carried out by their family… And during this workshop, associations working together, Florence Pierre, our friend from LICRA, staffed our stand…
All day long the workshops went on, buzzing with words, emotions and sometimes tears, with the dominant theme being the different forms of passing on, but also “how to act”. Laughing through tears is what many did, helped in part by Boujenah.
The evening, introduced by the voices of young people from Dror Habonim reading poems (including Paul Éluard’s “Liberté”), included a tribute to the victims of October 7. It ended with a delicious meal with oriental flavours, to the lively sounds of the Klezmer quartet Hotegezut.
Roll on the fourth Forum!!!