The story of Valérie Portheret is real: I first learned about her and her work from the French newspaper Le Monde. Her story has moved French society. It also brought to light the country’s opposition to remembering the treatment of Jews during World War II and the obstacles in the academy to historical research into that period, especially during the 1990s.
In 1992 Valérie Portheret wanted to become a judge. She had studied law but had not yet written her final research project. She decided to focus on Klaus Barbie, the infamous “Butcher of Lyon,” but her research led her down a different path. At first, her professors did not want her to study those subjects. At the time, the Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University was a bastion of anti-Semitism that denied the existence of the Holocaust. Yet Valérie was determined to continue and did so with the support of professor Jean-Dominique Durand, who risked everything to back Valérie.
Valérie learned of l’Enfant Caché, known in English-speaking regions as the Hidden Child Foundation, which led her to the Peyrins château. There, the son-in-law of the former château director showed Valérie the logbook of the children sheltered at the château. It was no small task to sort out the names of French children from the Jewish children whose names had been changed.
In a meeting of LICRA, the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism, Valérie ran into one of her neighbors, René Nodot. He had been active in the French Resistance and had written a pamphlet about the children sheltered at the Peyrins château.
These are all facts, though the order of events has been changed and the conversations have been imaginatively recreated. It all began in Lyon in August 1942, when orders came to deport the region’s Jews. Klaus Barbie, chief of the local Gestapo, and his henchmen chased the Jews down to the farthest corners.
Although it is true that Klaus Barbie was in the region at the time of the Vénissieux roundup, he was not authorized to take action in Lyon until the fall of that year, which kept him from personal involvement in the search for the children rescued from Vénissieux. There are many other documented cases of his hunts for children, including those hidden at the children’s home in Izieu. He was also accused of numerous cases of torture and rape. After living penalty-free in South America for several decades, in 1983 he was returned to France, and four years later, he was sentenced to life in prison. He was convicted of the deportation of some 7,500 Jews to concentration camps and of involvement in the arrest and torture of thousands of other people, many of whom were members of the Resistance. Barbie died four years later of leukemia.
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It is true that Valérie dedicated herself to identifying the names of the 108 children and locating them personally. Thus began a journey that lasted more than twenty-five years, a journey to return to those children their original identities and to listen to their stories. By 1994 she had identified the names of 93 of the 108 children from a list found in the archives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, a French organization. In 2003 she uncovered eighty-two of the waivers from the Vénissieux camp in which parents signed away their parental rights and entrusted their children to the members of Amitié Chrétienne. Among the children on the list of those rescued from Vénissieux was a girl named Eva Stein. Eva was one of the last children Valérie found, and not until 2018. Altogether, Valérie has identified the names of all 108, has reconstructed the stories of 90 of the children, and has personally met with as many as of the children and the rescue workers as possible.
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The case of the priest Alexandre Glasberg is also real. Glasberg had visited Germany in the 1930s and seen the plight of the Jews. Cardinal Gerlier put Glasberg in charge of care of the refugees arriving from Europe, and he set up several welcome centers for families who made it out of Vichy-run camps. When the Germans wanted to take the Jews of Lyon, Glasberg did everything in his power to free as many people as possible from Vénissieux. He concocted a plan with Germaine Chesneau to help keep 108 children from being deported, even though the children would have to lose their born identities forever. The plan was possible due to an ambiguous order from the Vichy government that children abandoned by their parents were not to be deported. Thus, the families of Vénissieux had to give up their parental rights in order to save their children, not knowing if they would ever see the children again.
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As Valérie went about locating the Vénissieux children over a twenty-five-year period, she reconstructed the timeline of what had occurred at the end of August 1942. In the process, she learned the stories of many other people, like Ruth and her family, who tried to escape the raid in Lyon. They were Czech Jews who had lived in France since 1938, and Ruth’s parents were photographers. One neighbor hid them, but another neighbor, who hated Jews, denounced them. Thus they ended up in Vénissieux.
The story of Rachel Berkowicz’s life is also based on facts. She and her family escaped from Belgium when the Nazis arrived, and they settled near Lyon. Her father had previously fled Poland.
After more than two decades of researching, searching, and documenting all that she learned, Valérie presented her doctoral thesis.
Characters including Gilbert Lesage, Pierre Gerlier, Élisabeth Hirsch, Charles Lederman, Georges Garel, and Lili Tager are real, as are many others. The real persons of Madeleine Barot and Madeleine Dreyfus were telescoped into one character herein. And a few details from history are conflated into one day for the sake of storytelling.
May this novel serve in praise of the great humanitarian effort of these fine people.