11  

 

Hidden and Surviving in France until the End

Escaping the tightening Nazi deportation net by trying to get across the Spanish or Swiss borders on the sly was known to be very hazardous and therefore not the choice of all the older boys and girls of La Hille, especially after the stories of the failed crossings reached those who were left behind. For the younger children, the exertions required for such escapes were out of the question and the strict orders from Bern against illegal escape, following the dismissals of Rösli Näf, Germaine Hommel, and Renée Farny resulted in tighter control by Emma Ott, who was in charge at La Hille from 1943 until 1945.

The Nazi net was indeed drawing tighter. After the Wehrmacht occupied southern France in November 1942, German police forces were spread too thin to effectively round up Jews for deportation. Therefore the SS urged three steps on Vichy General Secretary of Police René Bousquet: evacuation of all Jews from the border and coastal departments, the internment of foreign-born Jews, and the concentration of French Jews in three or four centrally located departments.

Bousquet decreed the exclusion of Jews from the border departments and as of March 16, 1943, foreign Jews had to report to local police whenever they moved, even within a community. Their ID and ration cards were stamped with the telltale letter “J”. And the Germans were eager to fill the deportation trains that departed frequently from Drancy to Poland.¹ Although the details of these measures had not penetrated to the colony at La Hille, the girls and boys had long been fully aware and afraid of the Nazis’ intentions. Those who elected not to try and reach the borders were actively looking for hiding places. They found them in many ways and locations.

Ruth Herz, then twenty years old, was able to find work in another Swiss Red Cross facility in the spring of 1942. She moved to Praz-sur-Arly in the Hte. Savoie French alpine region, which was then under Italian Army control and therefore safer for Jews. With the help of Mme Barusseau, the colony’s director, she was able to procure false identity papers. Later she transferred to another children’s home near Castres, east of Toulouse, and remained there until 1947.²

Lixie Grabkowicz, who had fled from La Hille with Ruth Schütz on New Year’s Eve 1942 (see chapter 9) found domestic employment and protection with the Fortrat family in Grenoble. “I lived with them, using a fake name, for 18 months. They warned me not to talk to strangers and they took me to church services,” she recalled in an autobiography written years later. “I was required to eat in the kitchen and was not allowed to use their bathtub. Those are things you don’t forget,” she wrote.³

On the day after the American troops liberated Grenoble, she found her way back to Lyon, where she encountered La Hille companion Frieda Steinberg. When she returned to her host family, a son helped her find a position in a children’s home in Villard-de-Lans, near Grenoble, where she took care of orphans whose parents had been executed by the Germans. One year later she returned to Lyon, again taking care of children, and took a course for dental technicians. Lixie met her husband there and they were married in 1947.⁴

Frieda Steinberg is another of the older girls (born in late 1924 in Vienna) who survived in France but had her share of near-miss adventures. She has excellent recall and shared her experiences in descriptive letters of recent years. When Eugen Lyrer assisted the older girls and boys with their escapes from La Hille in December 1942, Frieda paired with Helga Klein (age seventeen). Lyrer had provided them with money for the train and with canned food for the journey. Fanny Weinberg, one of the younger girls, recently arrived at the colony, urged Frieda to accept a pendant “for good luck.” Mr. Lyrer advised them to catch a train to Toulouse at a remote station. Unfamiliar with the region, the pair had still not reached the railroad when the curfew hour arrived and they were forced to seek shelter with a nearby family. They wandered all the next day, still unable to find the elusive train station and again sought shelter and food at a strange house. “The lady of the house arrived from evening prayers with an enormous cross ornating her ample bosom and a severe look in our direction,” Frieda recalls. She had cautioned her companion Helga to remain silent because she spoke French poorly, and with a heavy German accent.

Suspicious of their fake story, the woman guessed they were Jewish and threatened to call the police. As she dialed, Frieda remembered the religious pendant. She showed her the pendant and invented a Catholic mother who had married a Jew and given it to her. She also confessed to being a refugee from Belgium and pointed to her Belgian Girl Scout belt (which she was wearing because it had a knife and whistle attached). “The belt and the pendant worked wonders,” Frieda recalls. “From Belgium!” the woman exclaimed. “My mother was from Belgium.” She allowed them to stay overnight and had her servant drive them to a train station on his cart in the morning, with a sandwich and “ersatz confiture” (substitute marmalade) for the road. The pendant had indeed brought them luck.

After the driver took off, the two girls faced a line of German soldiers checking passenger IDs at the station. Since they didn’t have papers, it meant imminent detention. Just then a train whistle sounded and Frieda took Helga’s hand and whispered, “Run with me!” Out loud she shouted in French, “our train is leaving, we’ll miss it!” The trick worked and they were on their way to Toulouse. There they encountered the always cheerful “Onze” Klein who was returning from his unsuccessful crossing to Switzerland with Kurt Moser, and was heading back to La Hille.

The two girls managed the train ride to Lyon, but there they encountered the same surprise as other La Hille companions. The guide to the border recommended by Eugen Lyrer had been arrested by the Gestapo but his wife directed them to the Amitié Chrétienne (Christian fellowship), a cover organization for a resistance group. There they were referred to a convent hiding place and from there to individual French families.

In Lyon Frieda happened upon other La Hille friends. Like Lixie she was referred to a family in Grenoble, “a refuge and hiding place in return for housework.” Her hosts and rescuers were “the famous Mieg Family” (of the DMC—Dollfus, Mieg & Company, thread and yarn manufacturer). This family had fled to Grenoble from their home in the town of Mulhouse. Frieda says she “became the governess of their three children and I cooked in the morning.” She recalls “spending the whole summer with this family and their relatives at their summer home in St. Jorioz on the shore of Lake Annecy. There I didn’t even have to do the cooking as grandmother Mieg had brought her own cook.” The local mayor provided Frieda with a real identity card and she became “Denise Soutout,” born in Epinal. “It saved my life,” she recalls.

By coincidence the new name proved to be a real danger for some time. The Gestapo was searching for a resistance fighter named “Soutout” and Frieda feared that she might be interrogated as a relative, especially since Grenoble was located near a hotbed of the French guerillas. She recalls other close encounters: “While I was ice-skating, the chief of the local Gestapo (who was just learning to skate with his French mistress) literally fell into my arms, looking for a hold. A very icy embrace for me! From that day on, whenever he saw me on the ski slopes, he would come up to me with a polite (German-accented) ‘Bonnshoohr Mattemoisell.’”

With help from Ruth Herz and Mme Barusseau, Ruth’s superior at the children’s home, Frieda/Denise was able to obtain employment as a children’s caretaker at the Centres Scolaires-Medicaux (Medical Education Centers) in the Mégève ski resort. With her authentic fake name credentials and her ability to speak French without foreign accent, her true identity was well camouflaged from her new French associates. And she was safe from detection by the Germans because she now was on the staff of a Vichy government facility.

Frieda recalls aiding resistance fighters whenever possible and that many of her colleagues were partisans. Following the liberation in the summer of 1944, she returned to Lyon and did social work for the Jewish Committee, helping survivors who were returning from German concentration camps.⁵

32. Friedl Steinberg fled to the Annecy, France area and later hid in the Haute-Savoie region, then rejoined her surviving sister in Belgium after the war. She was one of the artists who left wall paintings at the “Barn” in Seyre. Photo from Alix Kowler collection, with permission.

Like so many others, Austrian-born Peter Hans Landesmann fled from the La Hille colony in the first days of January 1943 and headed for Lyon. The dark-haired lanky seventeen-year-old was somewhat of a loner and had aroused the anger of some older comrades who accused him of secretly raiding food supplies. In Belgium he had made outspoken comments to a host family. But his independence and resourcefulness served him well during several years of hiding and engaging in French resistance activities.

After he arrived in the Lyon region, Landesmann became connected with the Centre d’Accueil aux Jeunes Refugiés (Reception Center for Young Refugees) in suburban Villeurbanne. They furnished him a new name and fake credentials as Jean Pierre Bouché, born in Fourmies, a French town near the Belgian border. Bouché is the name he would retain until he died in the 1990s. Lyon was a dangerous place because the Gestapo was very active and they arrested Landesmann on January 28, not long after he arrived.

Peter may have been the son of a mixed marriage. Though his mother, Hilde, was Jewish, he was baptized in Vienna in late 1938, possibly as a protection. His father died before the war and he was identified in early documents as “Catholic.” This might have helped him to be released a few weeks after his arrest in Lyon.

The director of the reception center then helped him get work as a warehouse packer in Lyon-St.Clair (at F 7.40 an hour, he noted). The sales manager of the firm knew his real identity but apparently protected him. Camouflaged as Pierre Bouché, he joined the young French resistance movement (often abbreviated “FUJ”) in July 1943. A certificate issued in 1944 records that he had distributed clandestine leaflets and posters. This resulted in another arrest by French police on August 24 for “antinational behavior.” A week later a judge freed him and put him on probation. By December 1943 Landesmann had become a translator and interpreter for the German Military Railway Authority at Lyon, probably a safe place to be for a Jewish refugee—as long as his identity was not discovered.

On August 15, 1944, he joined the Maquis (French partisans) in the countryside at Marcigny, northwest of Lyon, and then returned to Lyon. He enlisted “as a foreigner in the First Regiment (probably a battalion) of the Charolais” (which helped to liberate Villefranche-sur-Saône on September 3), became a sergeant, and was demobilized on September 19, 1945. In 1946 Landesmann became a French citizen and changed his name officially to Bouché. Later he would learn that his mother was deported from Vienna to Auschwitz in March 1942 and died there, supposedly of influenza, in November that year.⁶

Peter Landesmann would not be the only La Hille teenager who joined the ranks of the resistance and the Allied armed forces. When local gendarmes came looking for Henri Storosum at La Hille on February 7, 1943, he was able to hide at the farmhouse of Mme Emilie deGrenier in nearby Gabre. He stayed there until February 11. “She was a courageous and dedicated religious person,” Storosum recalled.

During the night of February 11 Eugen Lyrer helped him get away and connected him with the Eclaireurs Israélites (“EIF,” the Jewish Boy Scouts) at Lautrec in the countryside northeast of Toulouse. The Vichy regime had disbanded the Jewish scout organization but it continued secretly as part of the resistance. (Many older members of EIF joined the French resistance, forming their own units; they joined the Organisation Juive de Combat in 1944. About 110 leaders of the EIF were killed in action or deported to concentration camps.)⁷

Storosum was with the partisans who liberated nearby Castres and the city of Albi (birthplace of painter Toulouse-Lautrec). He apparently had stayed in touch with Ilse Brünell of La Hille because she eventually joined him at Castres and both were part of a group that succeeded in an arduous crossing over the Pyrénées into Spain in mid-1944.⁸

One of the most bizarre connections of the La Hille teenagers befell Ilse Brünell, then already nineteen years old. She had been arrested and interned with her companions at Le Vernet in August 1942. After they were freed, Rösli Näf sent Ilse to Foix where she became the housemaid of Mme Olga Authié. This assignment probably was not by coincidence. Mme Authié was the official at the préfecture of the Ariège Department who compiled and kept the official registration lists of foreigners and Jews, which was required by the laws of the Vichy regime. It is from these lists that the deportation roundups and deportations were carried out by local police forces. Ilse disliked the work and Mme Authié intensely and complained bitterly about her, and even about her young daughter, throughout her life. She resented that she had to suffer so that, maybe, a few favors might be obtained. The record shows that although Vichy law required the shameful work being done by Mme Authié and her counterparts, some of the officials, and certainly Mme Authié, played a double role, apparently unbeknownst to Ilse.

La Hille colony counselor Anne-Marie Im Hof-Piguet recalled that the maligned Mme Authié, “who looks out for our welfare,” warned her that a new roundup was imminent at La Hille in August 1943. Anne-Marie rushed back to the Château and was able to send those sought into hiding before the gendarmes arrived.⁹

Historical records in the local archives reveal that Mme Authié actually was connected with the French resistance, especially after the German fortunes were turning sour. She harbored resistance fighters sought by the police and by the Germans in her attic, apparently unbeknownst to her Jewish refugee maid. She also issued false identification papers and, at times, took endangered Jewish refugees off the arrest lists. It is likely, though not proven, that the older La Hille boys who were subject to being drafted into the foreign workers force were allowed to stay with local farmers instead, thanks to her manipulation of the lists.

After the liberation, honors were bestowed on Mme Authié by the de Gaulle government and by allied military commanders (because part of the resistance effort in which she was involved helped downed allied airmen to flee to nearby Spain). Confusion, deception, and intrigue were part of the daily life in Vichy France and it is not surprising that Rösli Näf and Anne-Marie were involved in protective schemes unknown to their protégés.¹⁰

Ilse Brünell became so frustrated that she contacted her friend Henri Storosum, who had already joined the Jewish Scouts, for help. “I was in written contact with him and even he noticed that I could no longer bear staying there. He sent a young woman from the resistance who brought me to Castres via Toulouse. My job was to knit socks and to do typing for an underground newspaper. My French was poor, so they urged me not to talk too much.”¹¹

Of all the La Hille teenagers who faced dangers and frightening experiences while trying to hide and escape from French and German pursuers, none came close to the chilling adventures, hardships, and daring of Ruth Schütz. Not yet eighteen years old when she fled to Lyon with Lixie Grabkowicz on New Year’s Eve, 1942, she would spend the following eighteen months trying to survive with ever-changing false names and constantly on the move in the region around Grenoble. She described the details vividly in her autobiography, Entrapped Adolescence, published in 1997.

As “Renée Sorrel” she began her odyssey in early 1943 on a remote hardscrabble farm doing menial work for a taciturn, hapless owner who assigned her a primitive attic sleeping space. It was the first, but not the only, time that rats were running around her sleeping space. On her monthly day off she visited Lixie at her employer’s home in Grenoble and decided to hunt for other employment. She found it with a fairly well-to-do family of Vichy France sympathizers who displayed odd behaviors. She had to wear three different maid uniforms each day, depending on the chore, and was given the scraps to eat after she served the family in the dining room.

Because she feared that her false identity might be discovered, she soon sought different employment and lodging at an employment bureau in town. There she was offered a new dress and lodging by a blonde woman who quickly turned out to be the front for a prostitution pimp. Ruth declined the lodging but was able to keep the dress.

She was next able to share a room at a convent and worked at a scarf factory. Always afraid of being discovered, Ruth kept changing from one dingy rented room to another. Finding enough to eat under the stringent rationing system occupied all of her spare time.¹²

On the street she repeatedly encountered a young woman whose name was Charlotte. She was also from Berlin and hiding out. Charlotte invited her to clandestine meetings of a Zionist youth movement group (Movement de Jeunesse Sioniste or MJS) who would gather in the countryside on weekends. These new connections with other young people led her to join the dangerous activities of the underground resistance movement and it would change her life.

Her first assignment was to deliver an elderly refugee to a nursing home. He only spoke German and they were almost caught by the Germans in a roundup on a streetcar. But she passed the test and learned the ropes quickly. Numerous deliveries of false ID papers and documents followed. Doing such illegal work in the Grenoble region was at first fairly safe because relatively benign Italian troops were the occupiers. This all changed when Italy signed an armistice with the Allies in September 1943 and withdrew its troops from France. German forces assisted by the French gendarmes now pursued Jews and resisters in that area with vicious zeal.

33. Ruth Schütz joined the Resistance and helped to save younger sister Betty by arranging her escape to Switzerland. In 1943 she walked over the Pyrenées to Spain. Photo from Alix Kowler collection, with permission.

The following months brought varied assignments for Ruth, all of them dangerous and risky. She had narrow escapes and used her wits and good luck to fool interrogators and escape pursuit.

When her collaborators learned that the Gestapo was planning to arrest a Jewish infant from a Grenoble children’s home whose young parents were already in custody, she insisted that the child had to be saved. Since it was believed that “‘the director will only give the child to the Germans,’ I said, ‘in that case, I will be the German woman to take Corinne [the infant].’”¹³ Ruth disguised herself as a Gestapo woman, with raincoat, hat and sunglasses and a falsified Gestapo order for release of the infant Corinne. Faking a German accent and rudely berating the staff and nursery director, she demanded the child and hurried off with it via taxi and streetcar. With companions trailing her on bicycles she delivered Corinne to underground associates. (More than thirty years later, the now grown Corinne found Ruth at her Kibbutz in Israel and thanked her for saving her life.)

Ruth was then barely nineteen years old and the Gestapo quickly mobilized to arrest the child snatcher. Her underground leaders urged her to escape and connected her with the so-called “Jewish Army” (Armée Juive), which was skilled at hiding and guiding refugees across the Pyrénées into Spain. By then, unauthorized travel across southern France was extremely dangerous and difficult.

In Toulouse and at other intermediate points, underground contacts using prearranged identification codes would give her directions and lodging. After Toulouse she embarked for the difficult hike across the rugged Pyrénées from Quillan (Aude Department), which is about sixty-five miles on foot from the border with Spain. A mountain guide assembled a group of eight fugitives and after a two-hour hike on narrow paths he ordered that all papers and identifications be destroyed. “The pile lit up with a big flame and he covered the ashes with earth. That was it, my identity certificate, which was so authentic, was gone, devoured by fire, and so were my last photos of my parents and sisters. Now I was a person without a past or a name.”¹⁴

That evening the hikers reached an area controlled by the Maquis (French resistance guerillas). To her surprise, Ilse Brünell and Heinz Storosum, companions from La Hille, arrived that evening with another refugee group and joined hers for the hike to Andorra. It took several days of strenuous climbing on rugged mountain terrain before they reached the safety of the principality of Andorra. Food ran out, with only a limited supply of sugar cubes left. After the group crossed an icy mountain stream, they entered Andorra and then continued to Spain after a day’s rest.¹⁵

For Ruth the heroic and hazardous actions and escapes, beginning with her flight with Lixie on New Year’s Eve, 1942, ended successfully in Spain more than two years later. After several months she and others in her group obtained permission to emigrate to Palestine. Following a period of internment there she joined and helped to create a Kibbutz, where she has lived for many years and raised a family.

Although the younger children of La Hille had been spared during the roundup and internment of their forty older companions in August 1942, the continuing Nazi extermination campaign and the zeal of their local French collaborators in rounding up Jewish victims put all of the younger children in danger. As each month went by, they too were looking for places to hide or escape. Also, by then some were “aging” into the older teenage category.

In early 1942 four of these younger ones were still able to get away to the United States before the Germans occupied Vichy France. Their stories reveal narrow escapes and strokes of luck in the midst of chaos and misery. Their escapes were actively supported by Mme Lilly Felddegen from her office at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) organization in New York City.

Willy Wolpert’s father had fled to the United States in January 1941 via England and Canada. Willy’s mother and younger sister were left behind in Frankfurt, Germany but their necessary papers and affidavits were at the US consulate in Stuttgart in 1941.¹⁶ The mother and sister apparently never were able to emigrate. On June 1, 1942, the eleven-year-old Willy left La Hille and sailed on the SS Nyassa from Marseille to Philadelphia via Casablanca. Father and son had a happy reunion there when the ship landed.

Arthur Kantor and his sister Eva were born in Vienna. Their father had died in 1934 and their mother Maria was able to escape with them to Belgium after the Germans invaded Austria. In the summer of 1939 Jack Blatt of Dayton, OH, a violinist and refugee from Austria, came to Brussels and married Maria.

As his spouse, Maria could accompany Blatt to the United States, but the children had to stay behind with friends of their mother until she was able to request their immigration from the United States. The German army invaded Belgium before the Kantor children could obtain US visas and they escaped to Seyre with our La Hille colony, probably because they had been placed in the care of the Belgian Rescue Committee by their mother’s friends in Brussels.¹⁷ Arthur, sixteen years old, Eva, fourteen, and Willy Wolpert traveled to the United States on the SS Nyassa with a group of thirty-eight other children who had received permission to immigrate through the efforts of the US Committee for the Care of European Children, Inc.¹⁸

The last La Hille child to escape to the United States was also the youngest. Toni Steuer, born in Essen, Germany on July 24, 1936, had a tragic family history and her experience was typical of the persecution that the Nazis inflicted on even the youngest of Jewish children. Little Toni had two older sisters and two Steuer cousins. Their father, of Polish origin, was interned in Dachau and the mother apparently was taken to a mental care facility. All five Steuer children were brought to Belgium. The boy cousins were briefly at Home Speyer in Anderlecht and the older sisters were placed with a Dutch family in Courtrai. Because Toni was only three years old, Belgian Committee Leader Mme Renée deBecker kept her in her own home.

Toni was somehow put on the refugee train to France with our children’s group when the German army attacked Belgium in May 1940. At Seyre and at La Hille she became the “baby” and mascot of the colony. As an attractive child, and undoubtedly unaware of the events around her, there were plenty of girls eager to mother her. None of our campmates knew anything about her family and siblings.

34. Author Reed visiting Anne-Marie Im Hof-Piguet at her home in Bern, Switzerland, in 2004. From the author’s personal collection.

Fortunately her sisters’ caretaker family also fled to southern France when the Germans invaded and, because they were Dutch, managed to move on to one of that country’s Caribbean colonies. But they were not allowed to bring Toni’s sisters who were apatrides (stateless). They managed to place the sisters with Ottilie Moore, an American heiress who harbored more than a dozen young refugee children at her villa on the French Riviera. She succeeded in bringing them all to her home in New York City some time before little Toni Steuer arrived in the United States.¹⁹

On June 25, 1942, the SS Serpa Pinto brought one of the last groups of European refugee children (twenty-one girls and twenty-nine boys) from Lisbon to New York, via Casablanca and Bermuda. Among them was Toni Steuer, then still only five years old. A press release from the United States Committee for the Care of European Children, announcing the arrival of the SS Serpa Pinto, stated “the youngest, Antoinette Steuer, 5, is entirely alone in the world. Her mother is thought to be either dead or to have become insane, and her father was put in the concentration camp of Dachau, Germany, in 1939 and has never been heard from since. ‘Toni’ has been raised almost entirely in orphanages and children’s colonies. She has blond curly hair, blue eyes and is an intelligent, active and affectionate child. In her short span of years she has seen more tragedy and more horror than is right for an adult, much less a child to have experienced.”²⁰ The next day her photo appeared in the New York newspaper PM and in the Herald Tribune as part of a story about the fifty refugee children. It is through these newspaper photos that Mrs. Moore and Toni’s sisters learned of her arrival and she became part of the Moore household.²¹

Gerhard Eckmann, born on August 7, 1929, in Burgpreppach, Germany, probably had one of the saddest and most heart-rending fates of all the La Hille children. On January 13, 1939, his uncle, Isidor Ganzman, had written to the Belgian rescue committee from New York, guaranteeing “to pay for his full upkeep” if the committee would accept him in Belgium until he could help to obtain a United States immigration visa for young Gerhard.²²

On February 22, 1939, Gerhard did arrive at Home Speyer in Anderlecht and his American uncle, Isidor, stayed in touch with the Committee. However, on September 11, 1944, he wrote anxiously to Mme Lilly Felddegen at her home on Long Island, New York: “As you know, I obtained a visa for his migration to America and also deposited $520 with the HIAS [Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society] for his passage. Apparently it was too late, as I have never heard of him anymore. Do you know anything about those Belgium [sic] refugee children and do you know where they are? Is there anything that could be done at the present time?”²³

Devoted research by German librarian and historian Cordula Kappner has recreated and illuminated the tragic fate of this innocent young boy. I remember Gerhard well as one of the meeker and shy young boys at Home Speyer who fled with us to France in May 1940. Through the efforts of his New York uncle, and with assistance from Mme Felddegen, the necessary affidavit and follow-up for a US immigration visa were procured. “The Department has given advisory approval to the appropriate American Officer at Marseille, France for the issuance of an immigration visa [for Gerd Eckmann],” wrote “H. K. Travers, Chief, Visa Division, Department of State, Washington,” to “Mrs. Albert Felddegen” in New York on July 24, 1942.²⁴ Mrs. Felddegen happily notified Gerhard’s uncle.

In all likelihood Gerhard Eckmann was brought to Marseille for the usual interview and formalities at the American consulate, but fate intervened. Historian Lucien Lazare explains what happened:

In early November 1942, 500 children, gathered in Marseille by the OSE [Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants] with the help of the Quakers, were finally ready to leave for Lisbon on a special train. They were provided with American visas and reservations on an ocean liner from Lisbon to New York.

But the exit visas promised by Laval to the American chargé d’affaires, S. Pinkney Tuck, were revoked by order of René Bousquet, the secretary general of police in Vichy. Then on November 8, the American landing in Algeria and the breaking of relations between Vichy and Washington definitively put an end to renewed efforts for emigration.²⁵

Indications are that Gerhard Eckmann was one of the children who had visas but were refused exit permits from France. Instead of returning to La Hille, Gerhard apparently was taken to the nearby refugee children’s colony of Grand Rabbi Zalman Schneerson in the outskirts of Marseille. Fervently orthodox, Rabbi Schneerson gathered threatened Jewish children from French internment camps and others whose families had already been arrested and deported.

On April 3, 1941, he had first moved the children to Marseille from an isolated village in central France, later to La Vieille Chapelle just outside that city. When the Marseille police chief warned him about imminent arrests, the Rabbi moved his colony again, in mid-November 1942, to a remote rural area 100 kilometers west of Toulouse. There is evidence that Gerhard Eckmann was among the seventy children of that colony. In her book about Rabbi Schneerson’s colony, French author Delphine Deroo reports that Gerhard received a T-shirt there in a package from Marseille.²⁶

When friendly employees of the Préfecture of Gers warned the rabbi that they could no longer guarantee the colony’s safety, it was time to move again. On June 1, 1942, the colony left for a new refuge near Grenoble, and during the following year it was moved several more times and split into smaller groups to reduce the possibility of detection. Eventually Gerhard Eckmann and sixteen other children, plus one adult woman, were housed in a tiny hamlet, named La Martellière, near Voiron, about thirty kilometers north of Grenoble. In the fall of 1943 German troops and the Gestapo replaced the Italian occupation soldiers in that area and actively hunted the Jewish victims.

When Rabbi Schneerson hurried to the isolated house in La Martellière on March 23 to again move the threatened children, the Gestapo had already arrested them. They had knocked on the door at 3:00 a.m. looking for resistance fighters. Surprised, they shouted, “Da sind doch Juden!” (“They’re Jews!”). The children were imprisoned in Grenoble for two days and then taken to Drancy near Paris. Gerhard Eckmann, now fourteen years old, and a number of the other children were sent to Auschwitz in Convoy No. 71, on April 13, 1944.²⁷

German researcher Frau Cordula Kappner has faithfully investigated and documented the final months of young Gerhard’s brutal treatment by the Germans. At Auschwitz he and other young prisoners were trained as bricklayers in a special vocational program in Block 13a. As the SS moved surviving prisoners westward to escape advancing Russian forces, 356 young workers of the bricklayer program were put on a train bound for the Lieberose concentration camp near Cottbus, Germany. It was November 27, 1944, and there is a list of the prisoners. Gerhard was #118055.

It is worth noting that the Allied forces had invaded Normandy six months earlier and that most of France was already liberated. A little over two months before, Gerhard’s worried uncle had inquired about his whereabouts in the letter to Mme Felddegen. No one, at that time, was yet aware of the Germans’ final brutalities as they moved their captives back to Germany.

Frau Kappner describes the Lieberose camp, “which was in operation until February 2, 1945, and served as a forced labor construction facility,” as “the largest and most brutal of the Sachsenhausen area subcamps containing mostly Jewish prisoners.” While she states that the trail of Gerhard Eckmann at Lieberose is lost between December 1944 and February 1945, she cites eyewitness accounts of the brutal machine-gunning of young prisoners by the camp’s guards in the final days before liberation. “Much of this action occurred on February 3 and 4,” she writes.

Gerhard’s father, Leopold, died in Bavaria in February 1940. His mother, Amalia, was deported from Berlin to Riga, the capital of Latvia, on September 5, 1942. Gerhard’s uncle probably never learned of young Gerhard’s terrible fate, as Frau Kappner did not start her research until the 1990s. Even with a US visa already granted, there sometimes was no salvation from the Nazis’ brutal persecution.²⁸

In 1997 the citizens of Voiron erected a memorial to honor the child victims of the 1943 Gestapo raid. Frau Kappner has organized exhibitions and lectures about Gerhard’s tragic fate in schools and libraries of Gerhard’s home area in northern Bavaria.

The cooperation and courage of farmers and other residents of the Ariège region were critical for the La Hille children of all ages who chose not to flee across the closely guarded Swiss or Spanish borders. There were plenty of French Vichy “collaborators,” as they were called, and often it was difficult to recognize and differentiate them from the courageous sympathizers with refugees who were opponents of the Nazis and of the Vichy regime. The older boys and girls made their own connections with such friends but others were recruited and contacted by La Hille counselors like Eugen Lyrer, Anne-Marie Im Hof-Piguet, Mlle Ott, and others of the staff.

Edgar Chaim and Werner Epstein worked on the farm of the Swiss-born Schmutz couple near Escosse where Ruth Schütz had been arrested (a walk of several hours from La Hille). Georges Herz and Gerald Kwaszkowski spent more time at nearby farms than at La Hille. Rudi Oehlbaum, Joseph Dortort, and Egon Berlin were younger teenagers who forged close friendships with nearby farmers that lasted long into the postwar years. The farm home at nearby Borde Blanque was one of these friendly places for the youngsters of La Hille.

Henri Brunel recalls that he was given a train ticket to Pau, in the southwest corner of France, where a priest placed him with farmers for whom he worked until the end of the war. “Only my will to survive enabled me to endure this period of a very difficult existence,” he recalls, “for the farmer, on whom I depended, learned quickly that I was a fugitive hiding with a false ID and I was regularly threatened with denunciation if I complained about their exploitation.”²⁹

By 1943 several of the younger girls had reached the age of sixteen and thus became more vulnerable to arrest and deportation. On the other hand, they were by then also old enough to leave the colony and be placed with families in the area. Pierre Tisseyre recalls coming to La Hille with his father in 1943 when they fetched Frieda Rosenfeld who came to live with his family in the tiny village of Villeneuve d’Olmes, about forty kilometers away.³⁰ Frieda recalls staying at the farm and later moved to the nearby city of Foix where she cared for a family’s little girl until 1945. She was born in Vienna in 1927, her father was imprisoned in Dachau, then had to emigrate illegally to Israel, leaving his blind wife behind. She and other family members were deported, but Frieda and her older sister and their father were reunited in Australia after the war.³¹

In some cases members of the ever more active Résistance (the French Resistance or Maquis) played a role in moving and placing La Hille youngsters into rural hideouts. Cilly Stückler, barely fourteen years old, was taken by a resistance guide to a farm near Gaillac “where I was maid, babysitter and field worker, and of course with a fake name and false ID papers. Sometime in 1944 we watched the German retreat and then another Resistance member brought me back to Toulouse to a camp of child survivors, many from La Hille. I was so happy to find my sister Gerti there among them!”³²

Fanny Kuhlberg, just fourteen years old, was also taken away by an unidentified young woman of the Resistance:

I don’t remember where she took me, but on the way she gave me a new name, Françoise Colbert. I was now an orphan from Dunkerque and was to work on a farm. But I could say nothing about my real origin. This is how I lived with a farm family of Italian origin for three months. I cooked feed for the pigs, herded a cow and babysat a small child. On Sundays I walked 6 kilometers into some woods and met Cilly Stückler who was working on a farm about 12 kilometers from mine. [This indicates that Fanny must have been in the Gaillac area, about 140 kilometers from La Hille.]

The young woman from the Resistance came to visit me now and then to check on my well-being. She also asked whether I wanted to emigrate to Palestine and I agreed because my uncle was already there, the only family member who survived. When the war ended, I came to Toulouse and there I was reunited with my sister Rita. [Rita had also been at La Hille.]

More recently I discovered that it was the French Resistance that came to my aid.³³

Insofar as possible, the staff of the Secours Suisse wanted to keep siblings together. This is how Guy (Günther) Haas was transferred (probably in late 1941) from La Hille to the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE) colony at Chabannes in the isolated Creuse region, where his two sisters were living. To balance the numbers, a child from Chabannes had to move to La Hille and Frances Weinberg agreed to the change. She was offered the chance to return to Chabannes if she did not like La Hille, “but I liked it and I stayed.”³⁴

For Guy Haas, then twelve years old, the Chabannes colony “was great fun, lots of sports, new friends and the reunion with my two sisters.”³⁵ When the Wehrmacht occupied Vichy France in 1942, the colony was dispersed and Guy and his sisters were placed with farm families in the Haute-Savoie alpine region. “Cows, sheep and goats were my companions for 10 months,” he recalls. Later the three Haas children escaped across the Swiss border.³⁶

Every one of these stories of persecution, escape, and assistance while facing the threat of severe punishment testifies to the courage of these persecuted children and teenagers and of those who helped them.