“Hidden children and deportation” week
January 7 to 11, 2008
Speech by Andrée Poch-Karsenti
Odette Abadi: we are so used to saying “OdetteandMoussa”, as if it were a single name, that today I pause for a moment, almost questioningly: Odette, “our” Odette, alone here? Yes – and that is right, for first of all it is the doctor we wish to honour, and I would like, however briefly, to recall who she was.
Odette was discretion itself – not the kind that can make a person transparent, but the contained reserve of great people. She radiated a commanding strength imbued with humanism, a strength that was hard to resist, and which enabled her to face the harsh ordeal of deportation.
Why did Odette choose (from 1978 and beyond her retirement) to be a doctor at an institution for deaf and hard-of-hearing young people? One may suppose that her will, her sense of otherness and her desire to help children shaped her choice and contributed to her commitment to the pupils of the Cours Morvan. She also had the capacity, which she kept throughout her life, to empathise with suffering. One need only look at her professional career, which began with her medical thesis: “Notes on toys and the protection of children”. After the war she was a part-time school inspector in the 12th arrondissement, working for children; then head of department at the hygiene laboratory of the City of Paris; then medical inspector for health and social action at the Prefecture of the Seine. A common thread emerges: childhood and its protection, and action for the most disadvantaged.
The difficulties faced by these young disabled people, these “Children of silence”, could only stir the desire to help so deeply rooted in Odette. What echo did it find in her own story? Did she think they might stand for the world, deaf to the genocide being perpetrated – she who was silent about her past as a Resister and Deportee? On behalf of Les Enfants et Amis Abadi, I am proud to see Odette honoured as the doctor of this institution: her name in marble will long tell generations of pupils the story of devotion. Thank you to Aude de Saint-Loup, head of this school, for wanting and making possible this tribute.
Nevertheless, a few lines on a medium as noble as this cannot suffice to illustrate the meaning of a life of revolt against injustice. Odette was twenty-four in 1938 when she joined the Centrale Sanitaire Sociale on the border in the south of France to support the Spanish Republican refugees.
Courage, solidarity and tolerance are a matter neither of sex nor of age, but of our capacity to be human, to be vigilant.
Stripped of her right to practise medicine under Vichy’s anti-Jewish laws in 1940, she treated foreigners expelled from Germany and Austria in the few clinics willing to care for them. But soon forced to give up this too dangerous activity, she joined Moussa Abadi in Nice at the end of 1942. Nice was then under Italian control, and the whole region enjoyed an occupation that was rather lenient towards the Jews. Meeting an Italian priest who described the Nazi crimes in Eastern Europe was decisive for the couple: both decided, as Moussa put it, not to “watch the procession go by”. To that end they created a network to rescue children. For this undertaking, as heavy as it was dangerous, they asked for the help of Monseigneur Rémond, Bishop of Nice, of Pastors Gagnier and Evrard, of secular institutions and of mayors in the Alpes-Maritimes. All these outstretched hands enabled them, with no regard for their own lives (let us not forget that, both being Jewish, they too were under threat), to save 527 children from certain death when, from September 10, 1943, Alois Brunner and his Nazis unleashed a relentless hunt for Jews. Odette was denounced and deported in April 1944 to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, where, as doctor in the camp infirmary, with her courage, her will to survive, her strength and her humanism, she tried to bring care, support and friendship to her fellow prisoners.
From this painful experience, from which she never fully recovered, she wrote that magnificent testimony, “Terre de Détresse”.
Back from deportation in April 1945, Odette continued with Moussa, in Nice, to look after the hidden children so that they could find members of their families. Then, with the feeling of having accomplished a just and normal duty, she resumed her life with Moussa in silence about the actions carried out and the dangers and fears faced. Children who are here, who have taken part with such interest in the events around deportation, who perhaps sometimes suffer from a look or a remark, who sometimes feel different – when you pass this plaque, do not simply read her name. Let it remind you that courage, solidarity and tolerance are a matter neither of sex nor of age, but of our capacity to be human, to be vigilant.
Thank you.