October 22, 2020
By Albert Garih
1. Thoiry
During the fall of 1942, concerned about the danger that we might be rounded up and taken away, our parents sent my sisters and me to a farm in Thoiry, outside of Paris, where we stayed with two ladies, Madame Arthus and another lady, who I think was her sister. (I never saw a man there; the men had probably been taken prisoner with the French army during the Battle of France in the summer of 1940.) They were unaware that they were hosting Jewish children, because my parents had not told them, explaining only that we would be better fed on a farm than in a Paris suburb where food was rationed and scarce.
Our stay lasted only a few months. What I mainly remember is the pigs that they were raising. My room was upstairs, just above the pigpen, and I still remember being awakened in the morning by the noise they would make. The ladies were also raising rabbits, and I would spend hours in front of their hutch, watching them. I don’t remember, however, ever being fed them in a stew. We were mostly eating potatoes that they cooked in the kitchen, which was also the main room in the house. They had a big dog, which would put its paws on the table where the ladies were cooking, upsetting my sisters about the lack of hygiene. On the side of the house was a small yard where the rabbits had their hutch. The whole compound was enclosed by a big, light gray wooden double door that opened to the street. That was basically the limits of my space. I did not venture out. I stayed with Madame Arthus and her companion, while my older sisters, Jacqueline and Gilberte, would go to school. Their school was a typical country school with a few classes attended by both boys and girls. That winter was very cold, with a lot of snow, and my sisters would come back singing songs they had learned in class. Whenever I hear the song that starts, “Mon beau sapin, roi des forêts,” the French version of the German song “O Tannenbaum,” a typical Christmas song, it brings me back there.
One day, while in conversation, I told the ladies that we were Jewish, and they sent us right back to our parents. After that, my father took me aside and told me to never ever say that I was Jewish, something easy to understand to everyone else, except for the little four year old that I was at that time.
2. The Galop Family
In September 1943, when my father was deported to a forced labor camp on the island of Alderney, one of the Channel Islands, my mother found herself alone at home with her three children—my sisters, Jacqueline, 13, and Gilberte, 10, and myself, five years old. With nowhere to go and in imminent danger of being rounded up and sent to our deaths, she was terrified, desperate, and had no one to turn to. One day, at the street market in the suburb of Montrouge, where we lived, she met a lady whom she didn’t know, but somehow felt she could open up to, and told her about our situation. This lady, Madame Galop, moved by my mother’s story, went home to her husband and told him about this encounter. Her husband, Monsieur Galop (we didn’t call them by their first names, Aimée and Gabriel, because that was not the tradition in France, particularly for people we had just met for the first time), came to us the next day with a cart, and we took whatever we could and went to live with the Galop family about one kilometer away from our home.
The Galops were a Protestant family from Béziers, in the south of France. They had two daughters, Jeanine, four, and Mireille, three. They lived in a small house in Montrouge on a small street where everyone knew everyone else. The people in the street were mostly artists, sculptors, or painters. Monsieur Galop was himself a sculptor who worked for the movie studios, and behind their house was a large warehouse where he kept the sets he had made for the French cinema. For Jeanine, Mireille, and me, it was a great place to play hide and seek. The Galops had this warm southern accent, and we soon became integrated into their family. My mother and Madame Galop did the cooking; my sisters, Jeanine, Mireille, and I stayed home. Gilberte told me that she and Jacqueline were afraid of bumping into one of their schoolmates, because we were not supposed to be there, and we might be denounced, or our names could just come up in the conversation and that would be enough for us to be discovered and deported. Jeanine and Mireille played in the street with the neighbors’ children, and I would join them.
Having no work to do, my mom took advantage of that free time to teach me how to read and write, and I remember the first time I read a full page from a book. I had no idea what the book was about, but I was very proud of completing the full page of reading, which took me quite some time, by the way. For me, life was happy, as I didn’t realize why we were staying there and the dangers we were facing, and I had two playmates.
Madame Galop and Mum had to cook with a scarcity of food. The food was most of the time garlic potatoes or pasta with onions. I remember mostly the evenings, after dinner, when Monsieur Galop would tell us stories that were supposed to scare us because of the frightening tone he would use to tell them, but which we found very funny instead. For Christmas, Monsieur Galop built piggy banks for Jeanine, Mireille, and me with some pieces of wood that he painted green. I still remember these piggy banks, which looked like safes, in which we would keep the few pierced French coins we had. These coins with a hole in the center were worth less than a penny and our only fortune that the Galops and Mum were able to save for us. Monsieur Galop had built a small bomb shelter in the yard where we would go when there was an alert. We were supposed to be terrified, but instead, Mireille, with her southern accent would crack a joke, saying, “Tomorrow, if I find a bomb in the yard, I’ll pick it up,” which would immediately trigger a laugh among everyone and dissipate the fear the grownups might have felt about the danger.
For me, that was the happiest time in this whole period. The Galops were adorable people, we always felt that we were part of their family, and they helped make up for my father’s absence.
We might have spent the rest of the war with them, but we were still in danger of being reported. The people on the street were friendly, but there was a lady, Madame Perron, the wife of one of the painters, who was a great admirer of the Nazis and raved about the editorials she heard on the radio from Jean Herold-Paquis, one of the spokesmen of the collaborationist government. Therefore, we had to be extra cautious not to raise any suspicion. Since we were difficult to hide, the Galops had told their neighbors that we were relatives from the countryside, which was hardly credible, since when people had family in the countryside, they would rather have moved with them—where they had a chance of being better fed—than bring them to a Paris suburb where food was so scarce.
So, one day, Madame Perron said to Madame Galop: “When are you going to get rid of that scum?” This was surprising, because until then, she had been rather nice to us, complimenting me particularly for my articulate speaking for a five-year-old child. At that point, Madame Galop and Mum thought it might be safer for us to go back to our apartment, which we did. That was the end of our time with the Galops, a wonderful experience which, to this day, still amazes me for the courage of these people who, six months earlier, we hadn’t even known.
3. The Ménétriers
Back on our own, we were exposed to the danger of a visit from the French police or the Gestapo and from people spotting us and denouncing us. Our apartment was very small, so I had to go downstairs to play with the other kids. Mum was always nervous about that; she was afraid that someone might spot me and report us to the police. So she lived in constant fear of the police coming to take us away. And one day, that’s exactly what happened. One morning, my sisters and I were still in bed when there was a knock on the door. Two French Police inspectors told my mother, “we have come to take you away.” Mum started shaking, but the inspectors told her, “Calm down, we are going to report that we didn’t find you at home. But you must leave your apartment immediately because when we give our report, the police or the Gestapo will come to check, and if they find you, they will take you away.” To this day, I still wonder about the motivation of these police inspectors. Was it out of sympathy for us? Was it that they thought that the war was lost for them because that incident happened just around the landing of Allied troops in Normandy, or maybe, they belonged to an underground network? I was never able to find out about these inspectors, who like the Galops, saved our lives.
Mum had been given contact information for a social worker who might be able to find a hiding place for us, so she dressed me very quickly, and with my sisters, we went to see that social worker and explained the situation. The social worker, Mademoiselle Déjeubert, told Mum that she needed a few days to find a place for each one of us, and in the meantime, we should try to stay with some neighbors, which we did. Mum and I stayed with our next-door neighbors, Suzanne and Robert Ménétrier, a Communist couple who had a daughter, Monique, who was a couple of months younger than me. Robert had been summoned to Germany to work under the mandatory labor service, but had not reported for duty and was also wanted by the police. Suzanne worked in a print shop. Both worked on night shifts, which was very convenient, because at night, Mother and I would sleep in their bed, and in the morning, when they would come back from work, we would give them the bed and stay in the apartment. Meanwhile, my sisters would stay with Madame Papillon, in the lodgekeeper’s apartment. Madame Papillon had three children, two boys, Raymond and Guy, 14 and 12, and a girl, Colette, five. Her husband had been taken prisoner with the French army in the summer of 1940, during the Battle of France. Other neighbors generously offered to shelter us too, which gave us a good feeling about these French people, who were eager to help us in any way they could, as a way to resist the invaders.
We stayed that way for a few days, until the social worker came to tell Mum that she had found a hiding place for each one of us. My mother was placed as a governess with a family with eight or ten children near the Eiffel Tower, from where she witnessed the fighting between the French Resistance and the Germans during the liberation of Paris. Meanwhile, my sisters and I were placed in Catholic boarding schools in Montfermeil, a suburb east of Paris.
4. Montfermeil
In Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Montfermeil is where Jean Valjean found Cosette while she was getting a pail for water for the Thénardiers’ guests at their inn. In the 1940s, it was still a quiet place, perfect for hiding—not too many German soldiers, almost out of the tumult of the war. My sisters were placed in a Catholic boarding school for girls while I was sent to one for boys. I don’t remember much about my schoolmates. The only people I remember are the headmistress, who was taking care of me, and the priest, l'Abbé Guy. I don't think I ever knew the name of the headmistress. All I remember is that she was the one who taught us classes. (I tried recently to find her identity, in order to have her recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations, but without success.) I was just six years old, the youngest child in the school. The other kids ranged in age from seven to 14, and nobody bothered me. They probably didn’t suspect why I was there, hidden from the danger of being arrested and sent to a camp, and after the experience that I had one year earlier, I kept my mouth shut! This boarding school was the kind where children are sent after being kicked out of public school. Everybody was nice though. I didn’t have any fights with the other kids, who were older than I was and didn’t bother me. But my favorite person was the headmistress, who was always looking after me. She treated me as her protégé, which was a good feeling, considering that I was alone at six years of age, entirely cut off from my family. (I would only see my sisters on Sundays at church, and we didn’t have any contact with my mother, who was in Paris, taking care of a bunch of kids and unable to get news about her own.) The headmistress was probably the one who took it upon herself to keep me in hiding in that school.
It was the summer of 1944, a very hot summer, and we spent most of our time in the playground because school was over in mid-July, and some of the children had gone home for the summer vacation. We had some classes though, and as the youngest in the school, I was placed in the row for the young children (in those days, in small villages, each class was divided in four rows, each row corresponding to a grade). Although I already could read and write, I was placed with the youngest ones who couldn’t read and write, and all I had to do was to write letter strokes.
Montfermeil was where I experienced our liberation. One day, one of the kids from the school, who had left, came back telling us that the Allies were coming! I remember that day as if it were yesterday. We all went to the main street and saw the jeeps, the tanks, and the trucks with soldiers with different helmets and smiles on their faces—they were our liberators! The headmistress didn’t let go of my hand. She was always protecting me. The soldiers were giving out chocolate, chewing gum (which we called semsem gum), and even cigarettes. They were Americans. It was the first time that I heard of Americans. I had heard of the Germans, of course, the British, the Russians, the Italians, but who were these boys who came from I didn’t know where to rescue us? Without them, it is very likely that I wouldn't be here today.
© 2020, Albert Garih. The text, images, and audio and video clips on this website are available for limited non-commercial, educational, and personal use only, or for fair use as defined in the United States copyright laws.
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