For the children hidden by the Marcel Network, liberation was the moment of truth. Had their parents survived the war? Liberation separated those children whose prayers were answered from those whose prayers were not. For the most fortunate few, both parents remained alive. For others, one parent survived to love and care for them. For still others, an uncle or an aunt or a cousin did the best he or she could as a substitute parent. And for the rest, already matured by the experience of hiding out the war with strangers, there was no alternative to foster care.
None of them had it easy, not even the most fortunate reunited with both parents. All would be scarred for the rest of their lives by such wartime traumas as the forced separation from their parents, the slaughter of loved ones in the gas chambers, or the constant fear of arrest by the Nazis. Often for the hidden children, the reunion with their families after the war was almost as emotional in its own way as the separation had been under the German occupation.
Jeannette Wolgust considered herself among the most fortunate of the Abadi children. She knew that both her parents were alive, and she also knew exactly where they lived. “I had all the luck,” she said.1 Her parents had rented a small room in her uncle’s house in Brunoy, fifteen miles southeast of Paris, and managed to hide there, waiting out the occupation. Jeannette had been kept informed about them throughout the war thanks to messages Odette brought to her at the convent in Grasse. When the Allies landed in Normandy in June of 1944, Jeannette figured Paris would probably be liberated before too long. But she could not wait to see her parents again, not until the liberation, whenever that might come, not one extra day if she could help it. She decided to collect her brother Jean, then six, and leave right away for Paris.
“I’m going to Paris,” the fifteen-year-old Jeannette announced to the mother superior at the convent.
“No, you’re not,” Mother Superior Marie-Thérèse contradicted her. “You are not allowed to leave here yet.”
So Jeannette telephoned Moussa.
“He was terribly hesitant,” she said. He could not be sure she could travel in safety. The Allies still had to fight their way from the Normandy coast to Paris. (It was late June when Jeannette determined to go, and Paris would not be liberated until late August.) Of course Moussa hesitated. Here was an adolescent girl proposing to take her little brother and travel five hundred miles by train from Nice to Paris in wartime, unaccompanied by an adult.
But Jeannette insisted. “I know exactly where my parents are,” she told Moussa. He began to analyze the various factors involved. The fighting was all to the north of Paris. Jeannette would be traveling to the city from the south, and would not have to go through the combat zone. Her train trip would be no riskier than others Moussa had approved when hiding children during the German occupation. Yes, she would need papers to travel, and yes, the police would check them on the train. But it was summer vacation time and her papers could say she and her brother were off on a holiday to Paris.
It was a plausible story. In fact, Jeannette had been planning to go on a vacation with the nuns. “I told Moussa that instead of going with the nuns, I was going to Paris. I had this crazy idea that if they refused, I would have taken my brother and run away. Moussa knew that, and in the end he let me go.”
He did relent, but only when Jeannette agreed that two Boy Scouts in their late teens would escort her and Jean on the train. “Moussa preferred to let me go with the scouts than to risk my running away without them,” Jeannette said.
The train trip proved uneventful. The police who came by didn’t bother checking Jeannette and her brother. But in Paris, Jeannette admitted, “I did something stupid. I told the two Boy Scouts, ‘Thank you very much, but I know how to get to my uncle from here by myself.’” She said good-bye and the two scouts left her and Jean at the station in Paris.
Jeannette soon regretted the decision. She had to change stations in Paris, still a city occupied by the Germans, to reach the suburban line train for Brunoy, where her uncle lived. Once there she realized, “I had completely forgotten that my uncle’s house was on the edge of a forest about three miles from the station.” It was already dark—and frightening—as Jeannette and Jean made the trek, with Jeannette holding a suitcase with one hand and Jean’s hand with the other.
When they arrived at her uncle’s house, Jeannette knocked on the door. “Maman and Papa were there,” Jeannette said. “Maman let out a scream when she saw us—and fainted. We got down on all fours to revive her.”
First it was kisses and tears. “Then Maman asked, ‘What are you doing here?’”
“I wanted to see you,” Jeannette replied.
“It’s crazy,” her mother said. “Don’t you realize this was a very bad time to come? The Germans are retreating and there are gunshots everywhere.”
Jeannette and Jean had to be hidden once again, this time nearby their parents for only a short while, until the Germans surrendered the Paris region. But the most important thing, as Jeannette said, was that “our family unit was re-formed.”
Of the four Jewish girls at the Joan of Arc convent in Grasse, she stressed, “I was the only one to find my whole family again.” Françoise and Denise lost both parents. Martoune lost her mother. “When I compared myself to the others,” Jeannette said, “I always felt guilty. I had all the luck.”
Nearly a year later, in May 1945, Jeannette received a letter saying Odette was back from Belsen, with Moussa in Nice. She further learned that Odette would soon be stopping in Paris on her way to Switzerland to rest. Jeannette decided to surprise Odette during that stopover at an apartment in Paris, and got the address. It was a Sunday morning when Jeannette arrived and Odette opened the door.
“Bonjour, Mademoiselle,” Jeannette said.
“Unbelievable,” Odette whispered, embracing her and inviting her in. They talked and talked. At long last Jeannette had re-established contact with the woman who had been her surrogate mother for more than a year, and who, happily, had survived the death camps.
“I don’t want us ever to lose track of each other again,” Jeannette told Odette. And they never did.
Her good luck continued after the war for another fifty years. Jeannette married Dr. Laurent Wolgust, a general practitioner, and lives in a pleasant house with a lovely garden in a Paris suburb. “I never had a career. I was a kept woman,” she joked. “I’ve always been lucky. My parents really spoiled me. I had an adorable husband and a very comfortable life.” Jeannette and Laurent had a long and devoted marriage, two sons, a daughter, and four grandchildren. Laurent died in 2012.
The Abadis became Jeannette’s career. In their lifetime, she was their constant and closest friend. Over a period of twenty years she brought some of the former hidden children together again with each other and with the Abadis. At Odette’s death, Jeannette became the executor of their estate and the caretaker of their archives. Into her eighties, she continued to keep track of them, still searching for new morsels of information about them, always seeking to promote the memory of what they accomplished. Moussa himself called Jeannette “the truest of true friends.”2
Moussa and Odette made no attempt on their own after the war to locate former hidden children and resume relationships with them as adults. “We didn’t want to remind them of a tragic moment in their lives,” Moussa explained. “But when they sought us out, we welcomed them gladly.”3 Yet, this was only partly true.
Jeannette was the first example of a former hidden child who searched for the Abadis. In her case she was still a child. Françoise Knopf was the only other Abadi child besides Jeannette to keep up with Moussa and Odette from the end of the war onward. Françoise moved to the United States in 1953 at age twenty-six and from then on maintained a long-distance relationship with them by mail. Other former hidden children only managed to link up with the Abadis in the 1990s, a half century after the war, among them Julien Engel, Armand Morgensztern, Andrée Poch-Karsenti, and Martoune. But relatively few of the 527 children the Abadis saved ever saw them again.
They were so few, and it took so long for the reunions, Jeannette said, because Odette was protecting Moussa. Jeannette had wanted to bring the Abadis together with many more former hidden children years earlier. But Odette said no. According to Jeannette, “Odette would say that every time a former hidden child would appear, it would take Moussa forty-eight hours to recuperate because it was such an emotional strain for him to relive the past.”
Odette said she was protecting Moussa by resisting reunions with former hidden children. But in fact, she was also protecting herself as well. According to her friend Marie Gatard, Odette had the same reaction as Moussa. For Odette too, the joy of the reunions was marred by the strain of reliving the past.
It wasn’t just the traumatic memories coming back. Sometimes Odette found the meetings disconcerting. “I remembered holding little children in my arms,” she told Marie, “and then I would see them again as grandmothers or grandparents. I didn’t recognize anything about them.”4
The whole truth is that Moussa and Odette always limited their reunions to a select few of the former hidden children. These exceptions were people with whom they established new relationships as adults, meaning those they could enjoy as friends in the present and focus on the here and now. Most of the former hidden children were in a different category for the Abadis—reminders of an era they wanted to forget. Yes, as Moussa said, by not seeing these children again, he and Odette were shielding them from revived memories of past suffering. But they were both also shielding themselves for the same reason.
Martoune’s story typified the ordeal of those hidden children who eventually reunited with one parent. Her mother died at Auschwitz. Her father survived the camps—ill, weak, barely alive. At the end of the war, Martoune did not yet know the fate of either of them. She only knew that once again she found herself alone in the world, as she had been that day in Paris when the Germans arrested the neighbors who housed her, but never looked in the bedroom where she slept. Then she was eight years old. Now she was ten, and again she had no contact with her family. “Despite liberation, nobody came to reclaim me,” Martoune said.5
In fact, Martoune found herself alone even before the liberation. At the end of June the girls at the convent school went home for vacation. Only Martoune joined the nuns at their summer retreat, a residence in a small village between Nice and Grasse. By then, Jeannette had refused to follow the nuns and had gone off to find her parents near Paris. Françoise and Denise had been placed elsewhere. Martoune, still without family, no longer even had her friends with her.
After the liberation in August, she had no further contact with Moussa or Odette either. She found out later that her file had been turned over to the OSE, which placed her in another boarding school, Saint Marthe’s in Grasse, after the war. On weekends, a Jewish family in Nice took her in. “They were adorable and would have adopted me in the end if no one claimed me,” Martoune said. “The head of that family was a former commander in the Resistance, a wonderful man.” During the week though, Martoune still had to soldier on through Catholic lessons and prayers. “I was still using my false name, Arthieu, still saying that with such a name my parents will never find me.
“Food was difficult to find after the war,” Martoune said. “At Saint Marthe’s there was so little food that you had to eat whatever they put on your plate, however bad. One day they served Jerusalem artichokes. I couldn’t eat them because they made me nauseous. The nuns said that if I didn’t eat them I couldn’t leave for the weekend. So, under threat, I ate them. Then after the commander picked me up, I vomited my guts all over his beautiful car.”
Martoune was never adopted because the OSE managed to locate a cousin of hers in Paris, and, through him, her father, Herco Artzstein. He was liberated from Auschwitz in May 1945, straining to walk on frozen feet. Martoune rejoined him and the cousin in Paris.
Herco had been a young and vigorous man of thirty-eight when he was arrested and deported to Auschwitz in 1943. He survived two years at the death camp by pursuing his trade as a tailor, a skill the Germans found useful. But when his daughter found him again he weighed only one hundred pounds. “You could see his skeleton through his skin,” Martoune recalled decades later. “The man who came back was diminished, not the same man.”
Herco learned at Auschwitz that his wife and their son had both died in the gas chambers. Eventually, he told Martoune their story. Herco himself lived for twelve years after the war, but never really recovered. He suffered several heart attacks and died at the age of fifty-two, leaving his daughter to take over his tailor’s shop.
Martoune married at age twenty. Her husband, Victor Kuperminc, is a successful writer, perhaps best known for translating Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish into French. They have a daughter, twin sons, and two grandchildren, and live in a comfortable Paris apartment on the right bank of the Seine. “Until about ten years ago,” Martoune said in 2008, “I could not talk about what happened to me during the war, not even to my husband.” Then she gave a brief interview for a television film about former hidden children. “The film unblocked me,” she said. “I managed to get something out that had been obstructed in the past. Now I can talk about the war.”
Among the Abadi children who lost both parents, perhaps the most dramatic moment involved Lisette Levy. She was ten years old when she first started helping Moussa and Odette at the Clarisses with the depersonalization of the younger children. Lisette stayed there until the end of the war, the last Jewish child at the convent. By then she was twelve years old, still hoping to rejoin her parents and unaware that both had perished in the death camps.
According to Lisette’s account, Moussa arranged for her to go to Israel after the war.6 “I don’t want to go to Israel,” Lisette told him. “My parents know that I am in France and they will come for me here.”
They argued and Moussa lost his temper. “If you don’t agree to go to Israel, I will slap your face,” Lisette quoted him as saying. She stood her ground. “And then,” she said, “he slapped my face.”
In the end, Lisette discovered her parents did not survive the war. She went to live with an aunt in Paris. “But I never forgot that slap,” she said.
As far as is known, it was the only time that Moussa ever struck one of his hidden children. “I never saw him slap another child,” Lisette said. She was with him through all the tensions of depersonalization, and often saw him lose patience with the little ones, but said he never did more than bark at them.
Moussa admitted slapping Lisette. His version of the incident, however, was quite different.7 According to Moussa, Lisette refused to leave the convent because she was thinking of becoming a Catholic.
“But you are Jewish,” he said he told her. “Your parents have suffered because they are Jewish.
“People have died for you because you are Jewish,” he added, thinking of Nicole and Huguette, his two assistants who gave their lives helping him save Jewish children. “And now you are telling me you want to denounce your origins?”
Enough discussion, Moussa decided. “You are coming with me,” he announced.
“No, I don’t want to,” Lisette answered back.
“And that was when I slapped her face,” Moussa said.
Lisette never converted. Her aunt raised her as Jewish. Many years later Lisette indicated that the slap was forgiven, if not forgotten. She met Moussa and Odette by chance on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, gave them a hug, and introduced them to her aunt.
Armand Morgensztern, who lost both parents, remembers the liberation of Nice in 1944 as a rebirth for him.8 At the time he was twelve years old, spending the summer at a camp run by his Catholic school. “When I saw that the Americans had landed, I said to one of the camp counselors, ‘I am Jewish.’ Finally, I could say it.”
He also demanded to be called by his real name, Morgensztern, rather than the cover Christian name of Morini, given to him when hiding at the school. And, even though his parents had raised him totally outside of religion, Armand insisted on being allowed to go to a synagogue.
After the war Armand went to Paris to live with a cousin and study mathematics. He eventually became a leading expert in France on advertising and marketing theory.
Julien and George Engel also lost both parents, but probably had more choices open to them after the war than any other children hidden by the Abadis. They had relatives in the United States, Britain, and in what was soon to become Israel. The boys could have gone to any of them. “I might have come out a Limey or a quasi Sabra,” Julien said.9 Instead, he and George went to an uncle and aunt, Jack and Bertha Finer, in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1946.
By then, Alban and Germaine Fort, who ran the home for abandoned children above Cannes, had become family for Julien. For three years the Forts had done far more than just hide the Engel boys. They provided a warm, affectionate family environment. The Forts set Julien on a path to a successful life, through French schools to Princeton, Oxford, and on to a career for nongovernmental organizations providing aid to countries in the developing world, many of them in French-speaking Africa. Julien specialized in programs helping emerging nations strengthen their capabilities in education, science, and technology. Like George Isserlis, the surgeon working for Doctors without Borders, his narrow escape from death in wartime France led to an adult life of humanitarian work. Julien settled in Washington, D.C., but often visited the Forts on trips abroad. George also prospered in America, selling computer systems.
The State of Israel later honored the Forts with the title of “Righteous Among Nations,” a distinction awarded to non-Jews for saving lives during the Holocaust. A tree was planted in their honor at the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem. That tree would lead Julien to a voyage of discovery.
Several years after Alban Fort died, Julien visited Yad Vashem. He wanted to bring Germaine Fort a photograph of the tree honoring her and her husband, but where was it among the thousands of trees planted there for the Righteous? Julien met with Lucien Lazare, an Israeli historian of French origin working at Yad Vashem, to help him find the right tree. He also told Lazare about the lady named Sylvie from the Catholic Diocese of Nice who saved his life—and George’s—by taking them to the Forts at Cannes.
Lazare smiled. “That’s not the full story,” he said. “Let me tell you what really happened to you.” And so in 1991, nearly fifty years after the war, Julien Engel finally learned the truth. Lazare told Julien that “Sylvie” was the wartime alias of Odette Rosenstock, and that she and Moussa Abadi had saved his life. Sylvie didn’t work for the Catholic Church. It was the other way around. The Abadis had enlisted the bishop of Nice in their cause. In rescuing Jewish children, the Church in Nice worked for her and Moussa, the leaders of the Marcel Network.
“These are the people who saved you,” Lazare told Julien.10 He scribbled the phone number of the Abadis on a piece of paper. “They live in Paris. Give them a call.”
When Julien phoned a week later, a halting, rather elderly voice answered. “I barely had time to mention my name,” Julien recalled, “when he stopped me.”11
“I remember you,” Moussa Abadi said, thinking all the way back to the 1940s. “You had a brother. We placed you both in Cannes … ”
Julien was stunned to be remembered like that after so long. To his great pleasure, Moussa invited him for a drink the next day at a Paris cafe, where he also met “Sylvie” again, this time as Odette Abadi. Julien arrived with a big bouquet of roses. “It embarrassed them no end. They were heading next to the theater and didn’t know what the hell to do with the flowers,” he said. But the reunion succeeded in establishing an immediate rapport.
“That people who played a vital role in my survival should still be around fifty years later really blew my mind,” Julien said. “Then to have the opportunity to meet them was a very special kind of experience.”12 Over the next several years, Julien often called on the Abadis in Paris and learned more about them. Only in the last years of their lives did Moussa and Odette agree to tell their story, then mostly in private to trusted friends. But not even Julien, or any of the close friends, ever got more than a part of it, usually just the part that applied personally to them.
Julien Engel lives in a penthouse apartment overlooking the Potomac in Washington, D.C. with his French wife, Anne-Marie, a professor at Georgetown University. Most of the Abadi children remained in France after the war but a few settled in America, Israel, and other countries.
Françoise Knopf felt distressed at the liberation. She was seventeen years old, hiding at St. Christopher’s, a small Quaker hospital in Magagnosc, north of Grasse, and working as a trainee nurse. For her the war was over, but “I had no news of my parents,” she said.13
Moussa invited her to Nice to discuss her future. “I kept wondering why,” Françoise recalled. “I was waiting for my parents. I thought they would come back and I would discuss my future with them.”
Although Moussa knew her parents had both died, he tried to spare her feelings and avoided telling her. Instead he took her to lunch, treated her as a grown-up, and said he had arranged for her to continue her studies in Lyon. She would live at an OSE orphanage there, waiting for news of her parents. Françoise agreed when Moussa told her that Paulette, her sister being treated for leukemia, would be going with her. Paulette wound up in a hospital in Lyon where doctors said they had no hope for her recovery.
While in Lyon, Françoise received a letter from a childless couple in Dijon, Andre Baruch Meyer and his wife, proposing to be her godparents. Meyer, a professor of chemistry at the University of Dijon, was prominent in the Jewish community there and had been told about Françoise by the OSE. “My godparents were absolutely wonderful,” Françoise said. She spent summer vacations with them. And they arranged for Paulette to be treated at a leading hospital in Paris. Three years later, Paulette went into remission. Eventually, she would be well enough to marry and have children. In effect, the godparents saved Paulette’s life.
No godparents, of course, could ever replace parents. When Françoise finally learned the fate of her mother and father, she was shattered. News of their deaths came in an official letter from the French government six weeks before Françoise was due to take her baccalaureate exams at the end of her high school years. She was too shaken to sit for the exams.
Later that same year, 1945, her father’s friend, Joe Klein, returned from Auschwitz and gave Françoise the first detailed account of her parents’ arrest, deportation, and final days. “Joe was desolate telling me all this,” Françoise said. “But he had to so that I could start reciting the Kaddish for my parents”—the Jewish prayer for the dead.
Klein told this story: Once Françoise was safely hidden at the convent in Grasse, her parents, Rebecca and Jacques Knopf, stayed with the Klein family at a small hotel in Nice. The Vichy police came to arrest them there one day as they all sat down to lunch. The Kleins had a little girl, Madeleine, then eight years old. She started crying and the police left her alone. Madame Klein screamed, “Leave me too. I have to care for that child,” but to no avail. The police took the Kleins and Knopfs away, leaving Madeleine alone and abandoned in the hotel.
The two couples were taken to a synagogue, a roundup point for Jews arrested in Nice, then put on a passenger train to Drancy. They were forced to pay for their tickets. “It was terrible,” Françoise said, “people being sent to their death and made to pay for the trip.”
From Drancy, the Kleins and the Knopfs were deported together to Auschwitz. The two wives went immediately to the gas chambers. Joe Klein and Jacques Knopf survived in the camp working as tailors, from their arrest in November 1943 to January 1944 when Jacques Knopf, near starvation and ill with diarrhea, died in Joe Klein’s arms.
Françoise also learned that Madeleine Klein survived. An Italian maid who worked in the hotel found the abandoned little girl alone, bewildered and crying. The maid took Madeleine home with her and cared for her until the liberation. Then she called on Moussa, and showed him a picture of Madeleine with her parents, hoping that it would help Moussa find them. It was the last photograph that Jacques Knopf had taken of the Knopf and Klein families together. Somehow, Madeleine had the photo in her possession when the maid found her. Moussa contacted the OSE, which arranged to care for Madeleine until Joe Klein returned from Auschwitz. But first he showed the photograph to Françoise. She, Paulette, and their mother were in it too.
At eighteen, Françoise moved back to her hometown of Sarreguemines on the German border, working as a secretary for a cousin. With the help of a lawyer hired by her godfather, she sued in court and won back the ownership of her father’s former clothing store. The money from the store helped her support Paulette. Françoise married, moved to the United States, and worked for fifteen years as a translator for the State Department. She and her second husband, Bert Bram, live in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
Françoise had a daughter, Sylvie, named after Odette’s wartime alias. But for years, she could not bring herself to explain the connection. “I never talked to my daughter about the war,” Françoise said. Her daughter was an adult before she learned that she had been named after Sylvie Delattre in a long overdue moment of truth with her mother. “Why don’t you ever tell me about the war?” the daughter complained. “I want to know what happened to my grandparents, to my family.”
“And so I told her,” Françoise said, “mostly about the wonderful people who saved me—Sylvie Delattre and Monsieur Marcel”—Moussa and Odette Abadi.
Paulette also moved to the United States and married. She died of colon cancer at twenty-seven, leaving two sons. “The oldest, Joe, looks just like my father,” Françoise said.
The names of Françoise’s parents, Jacques and Rebecca Knopf, are among those of 73,000 Holocaust victims in France carved in stone on the walls of the Shoah Memorial in Paris. Every year since the memorial opened in 2005 there has been a ceremony on Yom Hashoah, the Holocaust Remembrance Day, honoring the victims with prayers for the dead, commemorative speeches, and a roll call of names on the wall. There are too many names for all of them to be read in any one year. Instead, each year thousands of names are called out by convoys—the trainloads that took the deportees from Drancy to Auschwitz. Françoise, now confined to a wheelchair, was unable to come from Washington for the ceremony the year that her parents’ names were read out. So Jeannette Wolgust and her husband went for her. “It was two thirty A.M. when they finally called my parents’ names,” Françoise said, “but Jeannette and her husband, Laurent, were still there. One could not ask for better friends.”14