My recent book Who Will Rescue Us? represents over ten years of historical research on a group of primarily Jewish children who fled Nazi Germany and Austria. The goals of my study were multiple: I wanted to grasp- to the extent possible- what it felt like to be a Jewish refugee child, through the children’s own eyes and words. I was especially interested in the Central European Jewish child refugees who had come to France through the Kindertransport, the German name given to the organized transports designed to evacuate Jewish and “non-Aryan” children from Nazi territories to safe havens. We tend to associate this program with Great Britain, which saved about 10,000 children in this manner. My research has uncovered the fact that a small number of children— fewer than 500— where sent to France. Contrary to Great Britain, however, France was invaded by the Nazis in May 1940. The French Republic, which had extended hospitality to the children, was replaced by the French State, a collaborationist regime. In response to this turn of events, a complex partnership Jewish and non-Jewish organizations based in the United States orchestrated an evacuation scheme for refugee children in France in 1941 and 1942. However, only 320 children were able to benefit from this initiative, including 280 Jewish children.
The children who remained in France became targets of increasingly violent Vichy-Nazi persecutions. At least 37 of the Jewish refugee children were deported from France to Nazi extermination camps, where they were, with only three exceptions, murdered. Those who survived did so in hiding under new identities in France, or by fleeing to Switzerland and sometimes even to Spain.
While I found some precious sources in archives, including several diaries, I was especially interested in conducting oral history interviews with as many former children as possible. This is how I learned the story of Renée and Gitta S., two sisters whom I interviewed in 2016 on a stormy afternoon in Gitta’s home.
The sisters were born in Vienna in 1929 and 1932, respectively. After the March 1938 annexation of Austria, their father left Vienna to try to reestablish the family in Belgium. However, in the words of Gitta “And then he was going to have mother and Renée and I come and meet him in Belgium. But after he left, Kristallnacht happened, and there was chaos, and we did not connect with him. So, our mother had to make a decision. We could have stayed with her, and we wouldn’t be here talking to you […]. So, she signed us up [for a Kindertransport] in Vienna […]. We just know we were petrified. I mean, you know, my parents told Renée she had to look after me. I was 7, she was 10. And she gave us a bag, a little bag, and off we went, and they were all strangers. All the people. The kids and the people who took care of us, you know, were strangers. And so, you know, we kind of went with the flow I guess.”
The sisters arrived in France in the spring of 1939, and were placed in a children’s home in the Paris region run by the Union OSE, a Jewish organization. In June 1940, the sisters were evacuated to yet another OSE home, in the unoccupied zone. The girls were present when the home was raided by the French police in August 1942, and witnessed the arrests of fellow children and their teachers. Their father, now in France, came to visit them during this period, but was soon after denounced and deported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered.
Most likely in early 1943, the sisters were sent to a Catholic convent for orphans. Both recall feeling protected there. Only the priest and the mother superior knew they were Jewish. However, as the war progressed and risk increased, the sisters recall that they were given an ultimatum: convert or leave. Gitta explained: “Mother Superior called us in her office […] she said: ‘It’s getting dangerous for you to be here. If you want to stay with us, then you will be part of our family. That’s fine. But if not, we have to make another decision.’ And Renée said: ‘Well, I can’t make that decision unless I check with my father.’ And this is something that father told her before he left, that if there’s anything, first, to take care of me, never to leave me out of her sight, and if there’s something that comes up, that she doesn’t know what to do […] to say, you know: ‘I have to check with my dad first.’ So, Mother Superior got the gist of it, and she said: ‘Okay, we will find another place for you.’ Because Renée did not want to stay there. She did not feel, you know… As I remember, I didn’t think we ever would be with a family again. I thought this is, wherever somebody takes us in, that’s how it’s going to work out. So I was very negative. I was very… I didn’t really… I guess I had no joie de vivre, that’s for sure.”
On January 21, 1944, the sisters were separated for the first time, and placed in two French families a few kilometers away from one another. Renée had a positive experience with her family, and helped them care for their new infant, which provided a good cover. Gitta, on the other hand, suffered from anxiety, migraines, and goiter. Nonetheless, the sisters survived the war and were reunited in a Jewish children’s home in Paris on August 3, 1945. It was there that the sisters learned that their mother, who had managed to escape to England as a domestic, had survived. A few weeks later, the girls were reunited with her in England. However, after so many years apart, Gitta had forgotten her German and could no longer communicate with her mother. Gitta eventually grew close to her mother, yet it took her years to work through her wartime experiences and sense of loss.
My book, Who Will Rescue Us? sheds light on the lives of children like Renée and Gitta, the so-called “lucky ones” who survived the Holocaust, yet who carried the pain of their experiences throughout their lives. If we listen closely, we can gain a deeper understanding of the actions Jewish children took to survive the Holocaust.
Laura Hobson Faure is the author of Who Will Rescue Us? The Story of the Jewish Children who Fled to France and America during the Holocaust, published by Yale University Press.
