The children taken in by the Abadis ranged from toddlers to adolescents. Often, though at tender ages, they had already survived enough traumas to fill a lifetime, all before undergoing the rigors of depersonalization. Françoise Knopf’s nightmare, for example, began years before her family narrowly escaped arrest in a Nazi raid because they left the door of their Nice hotel room partly open, and the Germans thought their room had already been searched.
Françoise was eleven years old in 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland. The entire population of her hometown, Sarreguemines, in the Lorraine region of France, had to be evacuated the day the war began because it was right on the German border. As it turned out, the Germans did not invade France until the next year, but by then Françoise and her family were already veteran refugees. From 1939 to 1943, she struggled through four difficult years before getting to Moussa and Odette. While children between the ages of eleven and fifteen normally face nothing worse than the pangs of adolescence, Françoise spent those years running for her life.
Her childhood began happily enough. Her father, Jacques Knopf, owned a men’s clothing store and managed to put aside considerable savings. Her mother, Sara, kept an orthodox Jewish home for Françoise and her younger sister, Paulette. Then war broke out.
On leaving the family home for what turned out to be the last time, they went by car to Nancy in northeast France to stay with friends for a few months. Then for three years, they slowly moved south, always refugees, always on the run, hiding a few months here, a few months there, before finally crossing the Line of Demarcation in the spring of 1942. They were arrested as soon as they crossed into the Free Zone. “My father was put in one camp, and my mother, Paulette, and I in another,” Françoise said.1
Jacques Knopf had been wounded serving France in World War I. Regardless, French police working for Vichy arrested him and sent him to a labor camp.
Sarah and her two daughters were released first. Paulette, three years younger than Françoise, suffered from leukemia. They applied for relocation so Paulette could be treated outside the camp. A sympathetic French official signed the papers to get them out. Sarah and the two girls made their way to a village near Lyon. Then Françoise, fourteen years old, went back for her father.
The commandant of Jacques’s labor camp gave him a pass to leave for dental treatment. “Take all the time you want,” the commandant said, hinting that Jacques could disappear. The commandant, a Frenchman, “was a good man,” Françoise said. “He gave passes to anyone who asked for one, because he hated his job. He knew the fate awaiting Jews who stayed in the camp and he wanted to get as many out as he could.”
On leaving the camp, Jacques met up with Françoise. Together they took a train across the Free Zone to Lyon, even though they had no proper papers and risked arrest at any moment. “Throughout the train trip I walked ahead of my father looking for trouble,” Françoise said. “We were checked twice. Each time I talked to the guards while he hid in the bathroom. I was fourteen years old, but I looked eighteen.”
A cousin in Lyon, Madame Jeaune, had managed to stay in the city, working as a concierge and as a seamstress, because she had false identity papers. She had a two-room flat. Françoise and Jacques stayed in one of her rooms. For food Françoise went off to the nearby village where Sarah and Paulette lived, carrying an empty suitcase. She filled the suitcase with cheeses, hard-boiled eggs, and chicken for the trip back. “There was nothing kosher,” Françoise went on. “I took whatever I could back to my father, always worried that someone would smell the cheese and that I would have to open the suitcase.”
The clandestine life in Lyon did not last long. As soon as they could, Françoise and her family joined up and moved into the Savoy region, then in Italian hands, above Nice in the French Alps. It was a good solution—for a while. The Knopfs were together again, Françoise could return to school, Paulette could get medical treatment. “The Italians were nice and kind,” Françoise remembered. “They serenaded us. We didn’t even know a war was going on until one night they bombed a Resistance unit. It was horrible—bodies on stretchers everywhere.”
With the fighting coming closer, and the possibility that the Germans might replace the Italians, the family decided it was time to cross the Alpine border into Switzerland. Françoise and her father went first. They hired a guide for the difficult trip over icy ground in the winter weather of late 1942. Snow often covered the trail. Françoise carried a knapsack with one change of clothing. “I was cold, tired, thirsty, and scared,” she recalled. “The worst thing was the silence. I always kept my ears open listening for the barking of dogs. Armed German guards patrolled the region with the help of tracker dogs. If the dogs picked up your scent, you were finished.”
Somehow, they made it across late at night, expecting a warm welcome from the Swiss. Instead, they got a nasty one from officials at the border. “To the Swiss we were refugees,” Françoise explained. “We were nothing, and they were very rude. ‘Go there, do this,’ they said, full of self-importance. They could decide if you could stay or not. Your life depended on them. They were wary of taking in too many refugees.”
The Swiss wanted to send Françoise and her father back, until Jacques reminded them that their own law required them to admit adults accompanied by minor children. Reluctantly, the Swiss let them stay.
But in the end, they could not. Sarah and Paulette were supposed to have followed with another guide. Jacques and Françoise waited for them, all nerves, and in vain. Finally the second guide arrived to say that Paulette had a fever and could not risk the trip in the cold winter weather. Devastated, Jacques decided there was no other choice than to go back to France and try the harrowing trip to Switzerland again, when Paulette would be stronger. Next time all four members of their family—father, mother, and two sisters—would go together. They would take turns carrying Paulette. That, anyway, was the plan. Françoise and her father did indeed go back to France. But there was never a second trip out. Although Jacques Knopf gave up his freedom in Switzerland to go back and rescue his youngest daughter, tragically, neither he nor his wife would survive the Nazi occupation of France.
Françoise, aged fifteen, lived out the next few months with her family in a Savoy mountain village under Italian control. By then Jacques’s savings had nearly run out, in part because of the money paid to guides for the failed trip to Switzerland. The Knopfs resorted to selling the family silver, piece by piece, in order to get by. They remained in the village until the Germans arrived in Nice in September 1943. At that point Italian soldiers on their way home trucked Françoise and her family, along with other refugees, out of the Savoy region. “I was sick all the way down the mountains,” she said. “When we got to Nice they gave us our papers and told us, ‘Run because we cannot do anything more for you.’
“I looked at Nice, awed by the blue Mediterranean Sea. Such a beautiful place, I thought, and we have to run and hide or we will be killed here.”
The family checked into a small hotel, waiting for a rescue from Donati’s ships that never sailed. After the Nazis raided their hotel, only missing them by a hair, many other dangers awaited. The family had to leave the hotel. “We were homeless,” Françoise said, “going around the streets, not knowing anyone.”
Without ration cards they had trouble finding food. Paulette needed medicine and a doctor’s care. When night fell, and an 8 P.M. curfew took effect, they had to be off the streets. So they found a door to an empty courtyard, sat down on the stones, and fell asleep. At dawn the next morning, Françoise noticed a church across the street. “Let’s go there,” she said. “At least Paulette will be able to lie on the benches.” She thought the church would be like a synagogue, but there were no benches inside, only chairs.
On her own, Françoise decided to talk to the priest. “I was fifteen, not a baby.” She went right up to the priest and told him, “Father, we spent the night out on the street. I have a very sick sister. We are Jews and need your help.”
“What have you done, my child?” the priest asked.
“Nothing.”
“You must have done something bad if the authorities are after you,” the priest said. “My advice to you is to go to the authorities and turn yourself in.”
Françoise walked away. “We won’t find help from the church,” she told her parents. “We have to find it somewhere else.”
Again they wandered the streets. Françoise became the family provider. Because her parents had national identity cards stamped with the word “Jew,” they had to keep to the shadows. But children under the age of sixteen, like Françoise, did not have to carry such cards. They could move around the city more easily without fear of being stopped, especially if they did not look Jewish, and Françoise did not. Her dark hair, tanned complexion, and straight nose helped her blend in with the Mediterranean look of the Nice population. So Françoise went for the food. She would buy a kilo of sugar on the black market, trade that for cigarettes, and that in turn for something for the family to eat. All the while, as they barely survived, the Knopfs had to keep away from German patrols. They knew they needed to do something else.
In their meandering, the Knopfs ran into family friends, the Kleins, also refugees surviving on the streets of Nice. The Kleins had heard about Moussa and Odette Abadi, but they were determined to keep their daughter, Madeleine, with them as long as they could. The Kleins, however, did tell the Knopfs about the Abadis. The next morning Françoise and Paulette each packed a little case and went with their parents to meet Odette at a small office. “It was the place where I saw my parents for the last time,” Françoise recalled.
The Knopfs spoke with Odette, addressing her as Sylvie. At the end of the conversation, Sarah Knopf told her daughters, “You are going with Sylvie.” Then Jacques took the girls in his arms. He blessed them and said, “We will see each other again.”
“I was angry and hurt,” Françoise remembered, “because my parents had not discussed this with me. I felt that I was already an adult. I had done grown-up things for them because being on the streets was a danger for them. They should have discussed important things with me, and they didn’t. My father knew I was angry, but he knew how to convince me they were right.”
“You are the only one who can help Paulette,” Jacques said.
“And that was that. We left with Sylvie.”
“Sylvie” took the sisters with four other girls to a boarding school for their depersonalization. The Abadis had not yet set up the system at the Clarisses. At the school, the Jewish girls had to stay hidden in a small room that the other students and most of the staff thought was empty, and they had to sleep two to a bed. After 5 P.M. they were told not to make any noise and not to go to the bathroom for the rest of the night to avoid discovery.
According to Françoise’s recounting of the story, a man in a trench coat came in on the second day. “I am Monsieur Marcel,” he said. He told the girls that they would be hidden in convents under new names and would have to pretend to be Catholics. He also explained, as gently as possible, why they could have no further contact with their parents until the end of the war. “I am going to teach you your new names,” he said. “The next time I come, I will call you by those names, so I want you to remember them.”
For Françoise Knopf, the oldest girl in the room, depersonalization was easy. She understood her life depended on changing her name. Her first name sounded French, so she could keep that. But because her family name could be taken as Jewish, she became Françoise Brun. Paulette too became a Brun. They had to learn that they were born in Mogador, Morocco, and that their parents, caught in the war in North Africa, had sent them to a convent in France for safety.
The younger girls in the room, seven years old or less, didn’t understand the business about new names and began to cry. “You cannot cry any more,” Monsieur Marcel told them.
The children looked at him, uncomprehending. “It was pathetic,” Françoise said, referring to his stern, unsympathetic reaction. Monsieur Marcel was still himself learning the ropes in those first few days of the German occupation. He would get better at the human side of deper-sonalization.
Moussa Abadi was no saint. His temper, his impatience, his barking at innocent little children learning their new names too slowly for him, all revealed ordinary human frailities. Like other mortals, his character had its good and bad sides. Above all it was his stubborn, uncompromising determination to save lives—despite the temper tantrums and other defects—that enabled the Marcel Network to succeed.
When Monsieur Marcel left, Françoise tried to explain to the younger girls why they had to learn the new names. The next day, Sylvie took Françoise to the Joan of Arc convent in Grasse to begin a new life. Paulette went to a children’s hospital.
Marthe Artzstein traveled a very different road to Moussa, but one that was in its own way just as complex and harrowing as the road Françoise had been forced to follow. Françoise, at least, stayed with her parents until she was handed over to Odette. Marthe, at the age of eight, found herself without parents and had to save herself. “I was completely alone in the world,” she said.2
Her father, Herco Artzstein, a Polish-born Jew living in France as a tailor since 1929, was arrested in 1941 and sent to a labor camp south of Paris. In the summer of 1942, Herco volunteered to harvest corn, managed to escape, and made his way to the Free Zone to hide. The family was preparing to join him, but they never had the time to carry out their plans.
For Bastille Day, the French National Holiday on July 14, 1942, Marthe left her mother, Havasura, and her brother, Noel, in Paris and went off to the country house of the family nanny to play in the fresh air. Three days later her mother and brother were deported in a massive Nazi roundup of Paris Jews. When Marthe returned to the family apartment, no one was there.
The nanny left Marthe with her parents’ friends who lived on the ground floor of the building, the Weiss family. The Weisses were Hungarian Jews. At the time, in deference to Hitler’s Hungarian allies, the Nazis were not arresting Hungarian Jews, but that restraint did not last long. Months later, Marthe awoke to find that the Weisses had been arrested during the night. She climbed out a ground-floor window, letting herself down onto a Paris street. “At first I didn’t know where to go,” Marthe said, “but I think maturity comes very quickly to children in times of war.”
The Weisses had friends they used to visit in the evening. Often they brought Marthe along. She remembered the address and how to get there. “But when I arrived they said they could not keep me because they themselves were hiding.” They put her in a home for war orphans.
Marthe kept her head. She remembered the secret address her father had given the family to contact him, and sent him a letter there. “It was like the bottle you throw into the sea,” she said, “but he received it.”
As an escaped prisoner hunted by the police, Herco Artzstein could not go to Paris to collect his daughter. So he turned over the job of retrieving Marthe to an aunt who lived in a small town in central France, Borg-les-Orgues. The aunt sent a friend, the mayor of her town, to Paris to make the arrangements with the director of the children’s home. It was a tough assignment. “The director did not want to give me to just anybody,” Marthe said. “He made me hide in a garbage can that was empty but smelled terrible.”
Eventually the mayor convinced the director to part with Marthe. The girl was afraid, not knowing the mayor, but went with him to her aunt’s house, where her father reclaimed her. Together they hid in the Savoy region under Italian control until September 1943 when the Italians left. Like Françoise, Marthe and her father were trucked down the mountains to Nice by Italians on their way home. Marthe called her hair-raising ride “Dante-esque” because “when we got to Nice the Germans were practically on our heels.”
Nice was too dangerous for Marthe’s father. He spoke good French but with the heavy foreign accent typical of a Jewish refugee. He could not risk encountering the city’s constant patrols and searches. Better to hide in the countryside, if he could find a safe home for Marthe. “I was a burden for my father,” she said. “To save himself he had to find a place to put me so he could move freely.” Father and daughter stayed briefly with a cousin in Nice until arrangements could be made. Eventually, through contacts in the Jewish community, Herco Artzstein found Moussa and Odette Abadi.
“Parting with my father was rather dramatic because I didn’t know if I would ever see him again,” Marthe said. “I had already been taken from this one to that one, very difficult for a child. Now it was good-bye and I didn’t know where he was going. I can’t even remember what we said.”
Marthe was taken to the Clarisses convent where Moussa replaced her family name of Artsztein with the Christian name of Arthieu. By then she was nine, old enough for the depersonalization to be relatively easy for her.
As Marthe remembered it, Moussa never had to tell the older children they risked their lives if they didn’t learn their new names and cover stories perfectly. “We knew the climate,” Marthe said. “We felt it. He didn’t have to say it.”
She too recalled Moussa getting angry with the younger children when they couldn’t get their new names right, but, under the circumstances, she thought such bursts of temper understandable. “He was impatient because there was so little time and it was urgent to place us,” Marthe said. “Certainly he was a very good human being, a great man. He did his best to put the youngsters at ease.”
“Your parents will find you,” Moussa kept saying to all the children.
“He was trying to reassure us,” Marthe explained, “but we were not reassured just like that.”
Marthe went off to the Joan of Arc convent in Grasse, where she would soon meet Françoise Knopf and Jeannette Wolgust. The three of them would become lifelong friends.
Jeannette Wolgust was born in Warsaw as Jeannette Swita, her maiden name, and moved to Paris as a two-year-old. She arrived in Nice with her parents and her younger brother, Jean, in July 1943. Jeannette, then nearly fourteen, remembers the summer months of 1943 in Nice as “a vacation of sun and sea.”3 She also remembers going to a children’s clinic where Odette gave her mother a slip of paper containing the address of a pharmacy where the Abadis could be contacted.
When the Germans arrived, the family tried to hide, but soon the parents realized their children would be safer in other hands. They still had the address from Odette. With a heavy heart, her father took Jeannette and Jean, then five, to the pharmacy to say good-bye. “I don’t remember any screaming, shouting, or crying,” Jeannette said. “It was the most extraordinary thing. My little brother and I didn’t understand anything. We were anesthetized. I must have said good-bye in a rather cold, indifferent fashion. All I knew was that we had to stay there. And a little while later, Moussa appeared.”
Jeannette would have recognized Odette. She didn’t know Moussa at all, but she liked him from the start. Unlike Françoise and Marthe, whose first impressions of Moussa recalled his sterner side—a man under pressure to get them renamed and safely hidden as quickly as possible—Jeannette recalled most of all his kinder, softer side. “He had a warm voice and knew how to make a child feel comfortable,” Jeannette said.
She had no trouble undergoing depersonalization and becoming Jeanne Moreau. The hardest part was the separation from her little brother. Moussa explained, gently she recalled, that the Catholics had no co-ed boarding schools. “Automatically, I was going to the nuns and my brother was going to the priests.” In the end, Jean actually went to live with a Protestant family.
Jeannette was taken to the Joan of Arc convent in Grasse, one of four Jewish girls hidden there by the Abadis. Jeannette was fourteen, Françoise, fifteen, and Marthe, nine; Denise Touchard, the fourth girl, was ten. For them, life at the convent, cut off from all family ties, trying to learn how to pass for Catholics, would be full of new traumas. Only their friendship for each other, and the tender loving care Odette provided on monthly visits, got them through the ordeal.