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New Faces at La Hille

When the Secours Suisse moved the colony from Seyre to the Château de La Hille in 1941, Maurice Dubois expressed his intention to add French children to the colony, probably to gain favor with the area’s population and with the local government authorities. At that time the Jewish refugee children filled the château to capacity and there was no room for others.

As many of the threatened teenagers fled and went into hiding elsewhere in 1943, newcomers were added, some French and other young Jewish children whose families hoped that they would be safer in the Swiss-managed colony. Spanish refugee children also became part of the colony, including some adult family members. Their presence changed life at La Hille and the role of counselors and teachers became more important, as most of the older teenagers who had mentored the younger children had fled. “Our colony has changed much,” wrote Edith Goldapper on September 23, 1943. “There are only a few older children left. No more concerts and that is very sad. With so few older youngsters, we each have to do more work. I am busy with doing laundry and I am also the librarian.”¹

The stories of the new arrivals illustrate the constant harassment, flight, and separation from their families endured by many of these younger children. The three Weinberg siblings, Robert, age eleven, Peggy, eight, and Percy, just four years old, arrived at La Hille a short time after the Germans occupied the Vichy zone in November 1942. The Weinberg family had fled from Vienna to Athens via Italy in 1938 (see chapter 1). They had moved to Paris in September 1938 and lived in primitive surroundings with father Viktor, the former attorney for Austrian heads of government, lucky to find a job as a steel factory worker.²

On October 10, 1940, they managed to escape to Marseille, the temporary refuge for many Jewish families at that time. From Marseille Viktor Weinberg fled to Spain over the Pyrénées, and then made it to Portugal. “Miraculously,” recalls oldest son Robert. “This I learned only later. At that time all I knew was that my father had disappeared.”³ He adds that “parents, being cautious, never told their children anything to prevent them from innocently revealing sensitive information. The less they knew, the better.”

Young Peggy and Percy Weinberg were placed at La Hille, thanks to family contacts in Marseille who knew about La Hille. In the spring of 1943, mother Margaret Weinberg narrowly escaped arrest by the Gestapo and fled with Robert to Castelnaudary. There, she accidentally encountered a resistance member who provided her with lodging and local contacts. Robert recalls visiting his siblings at La Hille in the summer and for holidays, although other sources indicate that he spent most of his time there.⁴ He vividly recalls scenes of the liberation at Castelnaudary (about fifty kilometers northeast of La Hille). The family was reunited after the liberation but it had lost many relatives.⁵

Though little Peggy was reunited with her family, she was killed six years after the liberation when a truck struck her on a narrow street of Castelnaudary.⁶ Two other children who arrived at the colony in early 1943 had gone through hair-raising experiences after they fled with their parents from their native Holland to the Vichy French zone in October 1942. Fred (Samuel) Weinberg and his sister Gonda (Connie), then aged twelve and ten, and their parents were caught and interned at the Rivesaltes camp, where deportations were already in full swing. (Note: this family was not related to the other Weinberg family, mentioned above.)

After she heard stories that children of mixed marriages were being freed from Rivesaltes, their mother, Esther, pretended that she was not Jewish and was able to fool the camp authorities. Another requirement for their liberation was that close relatives would care for the children. Through the Red Cross, the Weinberg parents discovered distant relatives who had fled to Ax-les-Thermes, not far from the Pyrénées. A stranger helped Gonda and Fred escape from the Rivesaltes camp and took them to the Saphier family in that city. The price: Esther Weinberg paid with her wedding ring.

As in so many cases in Vichy France that year, French police and Germans hunted for hidden Jews and regularly checked all residents for identification papers. The Saphiers decided to flee across the Pyrénées to Spain and took the Weinberg siblings with them. They were stopped and imprisoned at the border of the principality of Andorra, where France borders Spain. The family was interned, but the Weinberg siblings were sent back to the city of Foix because their documents proved that they had been released legitimately from Rivesaltes.⁷

Gonda Weinberg (Van Praag) recalls, “because we had nowhere to go, we were temporarily housed at the Foix hospital.” Their parents had been transferred to the Gurs internment camp where they encountered Mlle Emma Ott of the Secours Suisse. Through her intervention the two children were accepted at La Hille after a ten-week stay at the Foix hospital. “We were very grateful to go to the colony where we met so many children even though we could hardly speak any French,” says Gonda Weinberg.

Their father was deported to Majdanek in March 1943 but the mother was freed from Gurs in September and was able to survive the war, staying temporarily at La Hille and in several other hiding places. Gonda and Fred remained at La Hille until September 1944 and returned to Holland in May 1945. They discovered that only five family members had survived, while eleven had been “transported to concentration camps, never to come back.”⁸

The documents and recollections of another young latecomer to La Hille shed light on life at the colony after the older boys and girls had fled. Fernand (Fedja) Nohr was brought to La Hille by his mother in December 1943 and stayed there only until the spring of 1944. He was thirteen years old and had frequently been moved from one place to another since the defeat of France. His father was a union official in pre-Nazi Germany and his mother, native of Bialystok, then a Polish city, was a dedicated Communist. In danger because of their anti-Nazi activities, the family fled to Paris in 1933. Fernand’s father was interned as a foreigner in 1940 and transferred to the French army supply forces in North Africa. His mother was able to escape from the Gurs internment camp in 1940 and joined underground groups in Vichy France.

Through her resistance connections she was able to place Fernand in various children’s refugee camps, first in Moissac, then to the Swiss colony at Saint-Cergues, which served as the departure point for La Hille teenagers who attempted to cross the Swiss border. Fernand too was to have been sent across the border but by that time the Swiss had closed it completely.

After the Nazi takeover of southern France in November 1942 Fernand’s mother spent some time in resistance activities at Montauban and placed him at the La Hille colony. “Although it was located in a scenic and isolated area, La Hille was for me just one of the many way stations since the defeat of France. The origins of the colony, the fate of the children and the dangers confronting the older ones actually were unknown to me until 50 years later because at La Hille these things were not discussed with the younger children,” Nohr recalled in 2000.⁹

For me it was a relatively happy time in a romantic château surrounded by a beautiful landscape and, compared with conditions elsewhere, there was enough to eat and I was well taken care of. I remember how the older ones took care of us, gave us lessons and that Walter Kamlet taught me Latin. I felt that we were like one big family.¹⁰

We did kitchen duty and we carried water from the pump in a large kettle suspended from two long poles. Most of us wore wooden shoes like the local farmers. Each weekday from 1:30 to 5:30 p.m. we had classes at the château for French, English, German, arithmetic, geography, natural science and sports. We spoke mostly French, especially since many of the young ones had forgotten their German mother tongue, as did I.

France was liberated a few months after Fernand rejoined his mother in Montauban, “and we could again take up a normal life after the period of persecution and hiding. At the end of 1945 I returned to Germany with my parents.” Nohr remained and worked in the East German Republic after the war.¹¹

In November 1943 Emma Ott had become the director of the La Hille colony, appointed by the Secours Suisse. She had been a nurse at the internment camps of Rivesaltes and Gurs and in charge of several Swiss nurseries in France before coming to La Hille. She directed the colony until February 1945. Sebastian Steiger continued to care for the younger children and Eugen Lyrer remained as the teacher and devoted supporter for the older ones.

Poor health forced the retirement of Maurice Dubois as the director of the Secours Suisse in France in July 1943. He was succeeded by Richard Gilg, who had been Dubois’s deputy director since the previous October. Gilg would remain as Secours Suisse director in France until March 1947.¹²

The story of Josette Mendes (Zylberstein) and her brother Daniel is typical of the new younger French children’s arrivals at La Hille. Their father, Marcel Mendes, had been an astronomer and university faculty member at Besançon and Bordeaux. He lost his positions under the Vichy anti-Jewish laws in 1940 and the family, including Josette and her four brothers, were forced to move repeatedly to escape detention. Eventually the parents and children moved to Toulouse where the father taught mathematics at a Catholic institution. In December 1943, with the deportations of Jews in full swing, a policeman requested that Marcel Mendes report to his office for an “identity check.” Suspecting the worst, Mme Mendes pretended that her husband was ill and due to visit a doctor but that he would report the next day.

The parents decided to flee immediately and placed Josette, then just six years old, and Daniel, age five, at La Hille. The two older brothers were hidden with farmers in the Isère region by the OSE and the parents managed to escape deportation by hiding and moving repeatedly. They kept the youngest child, born in 1941. Josette remembers that “at the Toulouse train station many people were crying as they turned their children over to the Red Cross. Only later in life did I realize why they were so upset.”

“My stay at La Hille was not unpleasant,” Josette recalled later. “I knew that there was a war going on but did not realize that we were in trouble. ‘Les grands’ [the older children] went into hiding when the police came but I had no idea why they were doing this. We had a Swiss teacher but my brother, who was handicapped, did not go to school. Thanks to Mr. Steiger [the Swiss counselor for the youngest children] I learned to read, write and do arithmetic.”

Her immediate family survived, but fourteen of her Bordeaux relatives were murdered during the war years. Marcel Mendes came to fetch his two children at La Hille after the area was liberated in 1944.¹³ Josette recalls that she did not recognize her mother when they were reunited.¹⁴

Paulette Abramowicz (Erpst) was born in Paris on March 14, 1933. Her parents were of Polish origin and her three older brothers were born in Poland. All became naturalized French citizens. After the French defeat she was able to flee Paris with her mother and an aunt but they were betrayed and interned at the Nexon camp and transferred to Rivesaltes. There her mother suffered severe diabetes attacks.

At first hesitant to leave her mother, she was persuaded by the Swiss Red Cross staff to leave Rivesaltes for a Catholic orphanage. She has forgotten her transfer to La Hille on November 18, 1942, but recalls that on her arrival she received treatment because she was covered with lice. Just nine years old, she too became part of the young group under the care of Sebastian Steiger. Paulette’s father was arrested in the Corrèze region but managed to escape. One brother had joined the French resistance, and another the French army. Paulette remained at La Hille until July 1944 and, fortunately, was then reunited with her parents, her brothers, and all of her cousins.¹⁵

Little information exists about many of the other young French arrivals who filled the empty spaces at the colony in 1943 and 1944. Who placed them with the Secours Suisse and what happened to their families is not known, but their names are remembered by some of their companions and listed in the books written by Sebastian Steiger and Anne-Marie Im Hof-Piguet. They were Renate Treisler, Monique Evrard from Nice, Eva Fernanbuk (friends of Gonda Weinberg-Van Praag); Renée Riemann, René Baumgardt, Rachel Borensztain, Marie-Jose Chenin, Daniel Reingold, Jean Pedrini (of Italian origin); Georges and his brother Pierre Costesèque, both from Pamiers; Raoul, Guy and Mireille Perry from nearby Foix; the Detchebery brothers, Pierette Schnee, Justin Souque, little Jojo, Lucien Cruc from Boulogne, and François Clément from Toulouse.

In the summer months of 1945 just over fifty younger children were still at La Hille, the majority non-Jewish French children who had been orphaned or displaced by the war and including a smaller group of Spanish refugee children, most with their parents.¹⁶

Among this younger group remained Isi Bravermann (Veleris) who had come to La Hille with the liberated teenagers from the Le Vernet internment camp in September 1942. His recollections in an interview on April 1, 1994, vividly describe his life history as well as life at La Hille for the youngsters of his age group. He recalls that when he arrived in 1942, just eight years old and separated from his mother who was deported from Le Vernet,

I was taken to the bank of a creek where my head was shaved because apparently I had lice, scabies and sores. I stayed at the château two years and we went barefoot to the local school, not accompanied by anyone. Occasionally we were sent to work on nearby farms. I was assigned to herd cows, we made hay and collected potato bugs in tin cans.

At the colony we also had non-Jewish French youngsters, some of whose parents also were taken away, so they were more or less orphaned. One day I had climbed up a cherry tree with 2 little friends. Someone came to get us and said we’ve got to leave right away.

They led us away, the two boys older than I, and me, to a convent in a small village. There we acted like Christians. Although we were not baptized, we went to mass each day, we were taught the catechism and we were told to pray. If I prayed, my mother would come back, they said. My two companions fled. After two years in the countryside on our own, the convent and the old Sisters were too much for them. They left and I never saw them again. Both were Jewish.

One day we heard airplanes flying over the village as I was pumping water at the well. My first American came down from the sky and landed in the village. That was the liberation.¹⁷

After the liberation, an aunt who had survived in Belgium searched for Isi and he returned to live with her for a time. Information about his mother, who undoubtedly was deported from Le Vernet in 1942, was unavailable.¹⁸

As mentioned in chapter 8, the Kokotek twin sisters, Irène and Guita, were brought to “the safety of La Hille” by their mother on the day before the arrests of August 26, 1942. They had already experienced frightening persecution, “which our new friends at La Hille couldn’t believe,” recalls Irène. The sisters were born in Chemnitz, Germany, and the family had fled to Paris in May 1933 when they were just three years old. The father was drafted into the French army supply service and returned to Paris in March 1941. Two months later he was arrested, taken to the Beaune la Rolande internment camp and deported to Auschwitz in June 1942. “Miraculously, we escaped the Big Roundup (of Jewish families) in Paris of July 16, 1942, with our mother and fled to the unoccupied zone,” Irène recalls. From August 1942 until June 1944 they remained at La Hille and became part of the new contingent of younger children.¹⁹

Although the Allied forces had begun to turn the tide against the Germans by early 1944, the persecution and deportation of Jews remained in full swing in France and in other Western European countries. By June 1944, at the time of the landings in Normandy, a number of the younger La Hille children were no longer safe from arrest and it was in their best interest to leave La Hille.

“One evening in May 1944 Mlle Ott, the directrice [director of the colony], told me to prepare a bundle of clothes and the next morning four of us left the château, namely Guita and Irène Kokotek, Eva Fernanbuk and I, Edith,” remembers Edith Jankielewicz (now Esther Hocherman).²⁰ She continues:

A bus took us to Pamiers and in a public park Mlle Ott turned us over to a young woman, probably a member of the resistance. Seated on a park bench she gave us our first instructions and new names. I became ‘Edith Joncquet’ from Strasbourg. The four of us were taken to a Catholic orphanage operated by the Franciscan sisters [in Pamiers]. The food there was even more limited and we spent our time sewing and praying.

A few weeks later a tante [aunt] came to fetch Eva and me and took us to Toulouse to Mme Gisèle where we encountered Peter Bergmann and Gustave and Manfred Manasse [three of the young boys from La Hille]. [The house of Mme Gisèle was a temporary hiding place for many young people who were brought there and then moved to other locations].²¹

We were taken from there to Perpignan to two French women who accompanied us by train to the Spanish border area. In a garden that evening they whistled like birds and two Basque men appeared. They marched us all night and we slept during the next day. The following night we arrived at the place of a Spanish family. It was a dangerous mountain crossing in the area of Andorra. Eventually we reached Barcelona and came to a villa managed by Mr. and Mrs. Rabinowitz, where we received a friendly welcome. For the first time in years we could select new clothes in a big department store.²²

The Kokotek sisters were taken to a hiding place in the remote area near Castres in the Tarn region. A Protestant pastor hid them at the Château de la Barbazanié in the tiny village of Castelnau-de-Brassac, about seventy miles east of Toulouse.

A scary incident occurred while a young woman from the French underground transferred the girls to their new hiding place. It is so typical of the La Hille children’s experiences that we should experience it in the rescuer’s own words:²³

One day we learned that the colony of the Secours Suisse near Pamiers [apparently La Hille] was closing its doors to Jewish children because the threat from the [German] occupiers became too imminent. We needed to place them with non-Jewish families whom I located with assistance from my friend Jeanne Tahou. At the end of July 1944 I accompanied 2 or 3 young teenagers from the colony of the Secours Suisse near Pamiers to farmers in the Tarn region.

At the train station in Castres, the Germans on patrol, now more suspicious than ever, gathered the travelers in the waiting room for an identity paper check. I carried a briefcase filled with false ID cards, which I was supposed to deliver. What to do with this dangerous contraband? They’ll surely ask me to open it.

Without thinking I told Irène, the smallest and most vivacious: “Lie down on the bench (on the briefcase) and pretend you’re asleep.” The Germans probably wouldn’t wake a sleeping child. It was do or die. When one of the soldiers approached the “sleeping” Irène, the other one said, “Leave her alone—you can see that she’s sleeping.” From the corner I watched this scene, outwardly unconcerned but trembling inside. For the first time I risked the lives of these girls and possibly of others, too.”

Of all my wartime experiences, this and one other were the most dangerous and they depended truly on God’s help. When I met Irène 40 years later and she reminded me of the incident, I couldn’t sleep all night.²⁴

The two sisters stayed at the Château de la Barbazanié until the area was liberated in late August 1944. “Fortunately we were reunited with our mother and, after a year in various children’s homes, we were able to return to our dwelling in Paris and to a normal life,” recalls Irène, “but without our father, aunts, uncles and our grandmother who had arrived in France when we did, but disappeared in the Nazi death camps.”²⁵

Peter Bergmann and the Manasse boys had also been brought to a monastery in the village of Levignac, a few miles northwest of Toulouse, at that time. Perhaps a little more enterprising than the girls, they didn’t like the restrictions there and fled but were apprehended by the police and put into a youth detention facility. They managed to flee again and reached the hideout at Mme Gisèle’s. Sometime later they too found their way across the Pyrénées and to safety in Spain. At the time the Manasse boys were thirteen and nine years old.²⁶

Since Maurice Dubois and his wife Eleanor and Rodolfo Olgiati, the general secretary of the Secours Suisse, had begun their humanitarian activities as members of the Service Civil aiding refugees of the civil war in Spain before the defeat of France, it was quite natural that they also would assist Spanish refugees in the Vichy France colonies of the Secours Suisse.

When the La Hille colony was established in 1941, the carpenter Mr. Salvide was the first Spaniard to work with the youngsters. Starting in 1943 and until the closing of La Hille in 1947 some twenty Spanish refugees, most of them children, were added to the population. The carpenter, M. Nadal, and his wife followed Salvide and in 1943 several families with young children became part of the very mixed La Hille population.

In 1939 José and Carmen Marimon had to flee from Spain as republican refugees with their daughter Rosa, born in 1937. José Marimon had been in the textile business, but, like many thousands of their countrymen, they were interned in camps like Argelès, St. Cyprien, and Barcarès. The father managed to leave the camps by working as a farmhand and when Carmen and Rosa became ill, they found refuge at the Secours Suisse nursery at Elne.

In July 1943 the family was able to transfer to La Hille and Carmen was put in charge of the laundry. José became a gardener and Rosa was one of the youngsters under the care of Sebastian Steiger. The family remained there until the closing of La Hille after the liberation. “My early childhood was spent first [in the camps] with other Spanish refugee children and then with Jewish refugee children and with non-Jewish French children who were separated from their families,” recalls Rosa Marimon (Moreau).²⁷

While they were not Jewish, the Jaime Palau family of Borriol, Spain, underwent upsetting displacement and experiences similar to those of the refugees from Nazi persecution. Father Jaime fought against General Franco’s forces in Spain. He urged his wife Maria to take their two young children to France where his mother was living in the Hérault Department. Together with a cousin, her two children, and the newborn Pépito, Maria Palau made her way, mostly on foot, over the Pyrénées to the French border. From there they were transported by cattle car to Rennes, in Brittany. Nine months later they managed to move in with her French mother-in-law in southern France, where husband Jaime was also able to join them. Pregnant again, Maria was invited to come to the Elne nursery in 1941 by Elisabeth Eidenbenz, a Secours Suisse nurse who brought pregnant mothers to the facility from various internment camps. In 1943 the whole family was transferred to La Hille, including father Jaime. The children quickly became part of the younger group, now of mixed nationalities, origins, and religion. “We were finally in a peaceful shelter, protected from the external events,” remembers then six-year-old Conchita Palau (Romeo). “I had a Swiss teacher, Mr. Sebastian Steiger, who taught me to read, write and sing.”²⁸

It appears that Maria and Grégoire Villas, Sinda Losada, and the Olivo brothers were other Spanish refugee children who came to La Hille during the final year or two.

With the liberation of France the La Hille children left the colony, some to be reunited with surviving parents or relatives, others transferred temporarily to various children’s homes. The colony was closed in November 1945.²⁹