My mother was an
English and German translator. When my parents had to leave their positions,
due to German orders in 1941 forbidding Jews most work, they worked in
the administration of Jewish children’s homes of the UGIF.
Between 1940 and 1941, fleeing the German invasion, like
many families, we left the Paris area (we lived in Issy-les-Moulineaux),
and stayed in different cities, notably in Eure-en-Loir, then in Royan.
I don’t have a good memory of our journey.
At the beginning of July 1943, my parents sent me off
to the countryside, near Châteauroux (Indre) with my younger sister,
for summer vacation. We stayed with a former household employee of my
maternal grandmother, who was living a well deserved retirement with her
husband. She had seen me born, took care of me during my early years,
and we were equally happy to see each other again. Our mother had removed
the yellow stars from our coats, and my sister and I had changed our name.
We took the name “Bernard”, our mother’s maiden name. My other sister
had stayed in Paris, because she was thought too young to leave her parents
My mother was arrested July 31, 1943, in a round-up in
the UGIF offices. She stayed a few weeks in Drancy, and was
deported to Auschwitz by Convoy No. 59 on September 2, 1943. According
to one person arrested at the same time as she, and who survived, she
was gassed on her arrival.
After the arrest of my mother, my father had to hide the
youngest of my sisters with a family in the countryside. The couple that
was lodging my other sister and me gladly accepted keeping us with them
until further instructions. At the beginning of the new school year, in
October 1943, they enrolled us in the village’s school.
My father, who had
remained in Paris, hid at a friend’s, in an apartment. He was sure that
he should never have to go out. But this voluntary confinement weighed
heavily on him, and Tuesday, April 11, 1944, he went out into the street.
From later years, a document about his arrest came to us: toward noon,
a French collaborator, André H., age 35, saw him on a sidewalk.
My father’s face appeared suspect to this man, who gave the order to arrest
him immediately. The identification check which likely followed proved
fatal to him. He was taken to Drancy, where he remained
until May 15, 1944, when he left by Convoy No. 73.
The police report on the French collaborator who had arrested
my father, brought to light only in his cross-examination, cited my father’s
name and described the circumstances of his arrest. This man, condemned
twice in his absence to the death penalty (in 1944 and 1949) for treason
or conspiring with the enemy, had escaped to Germany in August 1944, and
presented himself, a free man, February 16, 1955, before the Permanent
Tribunal of the Armed Forces of Paris.
The person who passed this police report on to us added
at the time, “He was acquitted in 1957, and walks free, maybe cultivates
flowers ….”.
My sister and I led a trouble-free and peaceful life,
cared tenderly by our protectors. We had quickly forgotten the restrictions,
the vile Jerusalem artichokes and the insipid rutabagas, for we lacked
nothing: garden vegetables, grapes and fruits of the vine, chicken, rabbit,
milk and fresh butter.… We had all we wanted and were happy, thanks to
the complicity of the adults, family and friends who, at the request of
our father and in the efforts to spare us, had not told us that our mother
had been deported. We learned it one day, following a slip by our guardian.
But at that time, they did not talk about deportation; they only told
us that our mother had been “arrested”, and since we didn’t know exactly
what that meant, we calmly awaited her return.
After the arrest of our father, a cousin arrived from Paris
while we were at school. He was still there at noon, when we came home
for lunch. He had come to tell us that our father too was just “arrested”,
and that we had to leave our guardians for a few days, in case the Germans
would be looking for us. We didn’t really understand the seriousness of
the situation. All we knew about the little move they were preparing us
for was that we would spend two or three weeks on a farm, a few kilometers
from where we were, among animals and farm work, without going back to
school, and that delighted us.
When the alarm passed, we went back to the village we had
left, and stayed there until December 1944.
A little before Christmas 1944, our maternal grandfather
and our aunt had us return to Paris. They did what was necessary to be
able to welcome us in their home, all three of us together. The youngest
of my sisters returned first to Paris. Hidden for a year with the family
with whom my father had entrusted her, she had been unhappy, even mistreated,
but at least she had been saved.
My other sister and I left with regret the old couple
who had sheltered us for eighteen months, without doubt—as paradoxical
as that might seem at first—the happiest period of my whole life. I had
never realized, until these past few years, and even these past weeks,
from learning the personal story of each of my “cousins” of “trips through
memory” in Lithuania, how these brave people had saved our lives, my sister’s
and mine
Later, in 1998, I requested that they be honored with
the recognition as “Righteous Gentiles—Righteous among the Nations.” I
had to look for witnesses from the time when I was hidden in Levroux,
in friendly Berry, and I found, fifty years after losing contact with
them, some classmates who were glad to give me their assistance. May I
thank here Jeanne, Monique, and Jean-Paul, in the name of Françoise,
like Alain, who will receive the award in the name of his great-aunt and
great-uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Couagnon, my rescuers.
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I
love that photo, showing my father and I, in Summer 1936. My hair were
short cutted because I just had whooping cough with much fever. My two
sisters haven't any such a photo and are very jealous... I have now another
photo, which shows one of my grandsons, Antoine, aged six, taken when
he is about three. He looks exactly as myself at the same age !
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Our
aunt became our “guardian”. She was an admirable woman, who had entered
the Resistance very early, where her actions earned her the Medal of the
Resistance and the Cross of War 1939-1945. She raised us with much tenderness
and devotion, without ever complaining about the sudden arrival of three
little girls — of seven, ten, and thirteen years — completely changing
her whole life. My sisters and I owe her a lot, indisputably, for all
she did for us, in every area and on all occasions, well after she stopped
serving as guardian. When we left her home, she continued to come to the
aid of each of us three, in one way or another, each time it was necessary,
likewise to our children when, as teens, they in their turn had difficulties,
until age and illness prevented her. She left us in May 1997, at the age
of 93.
I learned soon after from my aunt that my mother had died
in Auschwitz. Looking back, she never spoke about our father to us, and
we never asked questions. There was a tacit silence, which lasted fifty
years. However, my aunt had contact with some of the survivors of Convoy
No. 73, for I found in 1997, after her death, their names that she had
noted on a card
In 1952, totally by chance I met André Blum, who
would become my husband the following year. His father had been deported
to Auschwitz in 1942 by Convoy No. 35, on September 21. He had been arrested
September 2nd, on André’s birthday. This similarity in the destiny
of our fathers helped me, without a doubt, endure more calmly and less
painfully the consequences of the disappearance of my parents when I became
aware of it, fifty years later, which was not the case for my two sisters.
In 1992, by chance during genealogical research that my
husband and I had begun that year, I learned of the existence of the Mémorial
de la Déportation des Juifs de France (Memorial of the Deportation
of the Jews of France) by Serge Klarsfeld, and thus I learned what had
happened to my father. Destiny had his life end about a hundred kilometers
from the city where his grandmother was born, in that Lithuania from which
his grandparents and parents had fled a century earlier ….
Descendants of my parents number today eleven grandchildren
and nineteen great-grandchildren, of whom fifteen are the children of
my children! The oldest, Eric, was born in 1979, and Sarah, the youngest,
arrived in 1997, the first day of spring.
Eve Line Blum-Cherchevsky
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Bernard Lazare
(1865-1903) : my mother, Germaine Cherchevsky nee Bernard. You certainly
heard of the Dreyfus Affair. In this affair, the first Jew who said that
Alfred Dreyfus was not guilty was a Bernard Lazare. In reality his name
was Lazare BERNARD, and he was my mother's uncle, her father's brother. |
