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Bill Benson:
Good afternoon, and welcome to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. My name is Bill Benson and I am the host of the museum’s public program First Person. Thank you for joining us. We are in our ninth year of the First Person program. Our First Person today is Mrs. Jacqueline Birn, whom we shall meet shortly.
First Person is a series of weekly conversations with survivors of the Holocaust, who share with us their first hand accounts of their experiences associated with the Holocaust. Each First Person guest presently serves as a volunteer here at the museum.
With few exceptions, we will have a First Person program each Wednesday through August 27th. We also will have First Person programs on Tuesdays in June and July, so for each of the weeks in June and July, we’ll have two programs—one on Tuesdays and one on Wednesdays.
The museum’s website at www.USHMM.org provides a list of the upcoming First Person guests. Just go to the website, and click on Public Programs and you’ll get to First Person under the Public Programs section.
This 2008 season of First Person is made possible through the generosity of the Louis and Dora Smith Foundation, to whom we are grateful for again sponsoring First Person. Jacqueline Birn will share with us her First Person account of his experience during the Holocaust and as a survivor, for about 45 minutes.
If time allows, we will have an opportunity for you to ask Jacqueline some questions. Before you are introduced to her, I have a couple of requests of you and a couple of announcements to make. First, if possible, we ask that you please stay seated throughout the one-hour program. That way, we minimize any disruptions for Jacqueline as she speaks.
If we do have a question-and-answer period, I ask that you make your question as brief as possible. I will repeat the question so all in the room hear it, and then Jacqueline will respond to your question. If you have a cell phone or pager that has not yet been turned off, we ask that you do that at this time.
I’d like to also let those of you who have passes for the permanent exhibition this afternoon, know that they are good for the entire afternoon, so you can sit comfortably with us if you wish until our program ends at 2:00.
In January, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum announced that it began providing information to Holocaust survivors and their families from the International Tracing Service, or ITS, Archive. Located in Germany, the ITS Archive was the largest, closed Holocaust archive in the world, containing information on approximately 17.5 million victims of the Nazis, both Jews and non-Jews.
After years of effort, the archive has been opened to the museum. The ITS material is being transferred in digital form to the museum in a series of installments, the first of which arrived in August 2007. More information on the ITS collection can be found on the museum’s website, or by visiting the museum’s Benjamin and Vladka Meed Registry of Holocaust Survivors that is located in the Wexner Learning Center on the second floor.
The Holocaust was a state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Jews were the primary victims; six million were murdered. Gypsies, the handicapped and Poles were also targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic or national reasons.
Millions more, including homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, and political dissidents also suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi tyranny. What you are about to hear from Jacqueline Birn is one individual’s account of the Holocaust. We have prepared a brief slide presentation to help with Jacqueline’s introduction.
We begin with this portrait of six-year-old Jacqueline Mendels. Jacqueline was born April 23rd, 1935 in Paris, France. France is highlighted on this map of Europe. Jacqueline’s mother Ellen was born in Germany and her father Frits was born in the Netherlands. Jacqueline was the middle of three children.
Here we see Ellen Mendels with her two daughters, Manuela and Jacqueline. Jacqueline is on your right. This photograph was taken on Ellen’s last visit to Hamburg, Germany, to see her family before World War II began. The Mendels lived in Paris and life was quite normal until Germany invaded Poland in September 1939.
In this photo, Jacqueline and her sister posed in the courtyard of their apartment in Paris. In 1941, her father was forced to sell his business to one of his non-Jewish business associates but continued to work in the background. The next year, French Jews were required to wear yellow stars.
Jacqueline’s father found two reliable farmers to help the family escape across the demarcation line to the Vichy controlled southern zone of France. On this map, we can see the German occupied and the southern unoccupied zones in France. On November 11th, 1942, Hitler ordered the occupation of all of France, and we will certainly hear more about this in a little bit.
The family lived in the tiny village of Le Got in southern France for 29 months. They lived in two rooms with no running water or electricity. Here we see a contemporary photo of the house where the family lived in Le Got. This next photo, which I think you’ll all really enjoy, is a birthday card that Jacqueline made for her mother while the family was in hiding.
Allied forces liberated Paris in August 1944. In November of that year, the family, which now included a son born under difficult circumstances in 1943, resumed their life in Paris. From left to right are Manuela and Jacqueline and their mother Ellen, holding their newborn brother, Franklin.
And we close with a photo of Jacqueline and Manuela in 1946. This photograph was taken in Holland, where Jacqueline and her sister traveled to reunite with surviving family members. Jacqueline would come to the United States in 1957 to be with her American husband, whom she met in Paris.
Her future husband, Richard, was studying in Paris and they would move to the United States and marry in 1958. They lived in New York City, where Jacqueline worked as a chemist and Richard studied and taught, while waiting the required four years to join the United States Foreign Service because he married a foreign-born person.
Once Richard began his Foreign Service career, they would live in many places around the world such as Toronto, Hong Kong, Malta, Mexico City and Helsinki, where their daughter was born. They also had several stints in Washington, D.C. Jacqueline worked for the Foreign Service institute, where she taught French and helped prepare Foreign Service officers who were going to France or to Europe.
Later, Jacqueline taught foreign language instructors. Both Jacqueline and Richard are now retired. They have two children, Daniel Franklin and Anne-Emanuelle. They also have a seven-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter, Esperanza, whom they enjoy babysitting in Toronto where she lives.
I’m pleased to let you know that Jacqueline’s husband Richard is with us today. Richard, you might just give a little wave? Thank you. Today, Jacqueline and Richard live in Bethesda, Maryland, after living many years in Virginia. Continuing a family tradition, Jacqueline is an accomplished musician.
She is presently the First Cellist Emeritus performing regularly with the McLean Symphony in McLean, Virginia. Jacqueline is also a member of the Friday Morning Music Club, which performs annually at the Kennedy Center and plays chamber music regularly.
Jacqueline speaks often about her Holocaust experience. This coming September, she will speak at Michigan State University. Jacqueline volunteers for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by editing documents that are written in French. With that, I’d like to ask you to join me in welcoming our First Person, Mrs. Jacqueline Birn.
Jacqueline, welcome, and thank you for your willingness to be our First Person today. Let’s begin with you first telling us a little bit about your family and your own early life before the Anschluss, when Hitler annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
If you talk about 1938, of course I was so young that I don’t recall anything, but the wonderful thing is that my parents created, or opened, journals—you would call them diaries, actually—for all of us [children], for the three of us, and so I’ve been reading those documents actually, that have taught me so much.
And then of course there are photos in my journal, in my sister’s journal and my brother who, unfortunately, is not with us anymore, and I learned that way. Otherwise, I cannot recall that…I cannot remember my grandmother, I cannot remember my grandparents in Holland. I was just too young.
I know that after the Anschluss, we left Paris and that we went to an area near Fontainebleau and then in 1939, we left again, and I recall that, sleeping in a room with a lot of flies and things like that. I also recall going to the seashore, to the North Sea, every summer—not probably 1937. But 1938 and ’39, we went.
But my father wrote in my journal that his father, Emanuel Mendels, died of a heart attack in his sleep; I don’t recall my grandfather at all. I was so close to my sister and all our lives actually, we’ve been very, very close and I think we are very fortunate to have each other. Unfortunately, she’s not in the same city, but it has been a very, very close relationship.
Bill Benson:
Jacqueline, you had a large extended family. Tell us about that family, how large it was.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
On my mother’s side, she was an only child. Actually, her father (my grandfather), Jacob Abraham Hess, married his niece, Sophie Hess. It was a second marriage for him and they only had that one child. My grandmother Sophie had a younger brother who was a very wealthy man before World War II and who was a musician.
All our family was musical on my mother’s side actually, from way, way back. My great, great, great was a soprano singer and then we all played strings. My mother and her mother always talked about her brother, who organized chamber music in his house the day after Kristallnacht was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
And thanks to the family money, his wife was able to get him out, but he had to get out of Germany immediately without a penny, and then his four children and his wife were on the Kindertransport and made a life, fortunately, for themselves in England. But I met them after the war. I don’t remember.
On my father’s side, it was a large family—lots of cousins and my father had a happy youth, first in Almelo, a little town on the eastern part of Holland. But something that I didn’t write in my memoirs is that I met somebody from Almelo and I said, “My father Frits Mendels was from Almelo,” but she’s not Jewish.
And at that time in Europe, where the Jews lived on one side of the street and another on the other side of the street, and so they never met, they never knew.
Bill Benson:
So they didn’t even know each other.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
No. Right. I don’t know if my father went to a Jewish school. He prepared for his bar mitzvah and his mother was very religious; his father, not so much. But my father had lots of cousins and as I say again and again, is that the closest members perished in Sobibor and Auschwitz. [cries] So after the war, there was nobody.
Bill Benson:
Your father was a business man. Tell us a little bit about his business, but during that period prior to the war, he was really suffering economically because of the pending war and the economics in Europe. Say a little bit about this.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Yes. Well, actually, my father’s business suffered already in the mid ‘30s, just like in the U.S. there was a recession, and my father’s business was in import/export of specialty foods, so it was very, very hard that Prime Minister Leon Blum was trying his very best.
He was a socialist. He was the first Jewish prime minister actually. But things were not going well. First of all, we were very young. My father was born in 1905, so when war broke out, he was only 35 and my mother 34. So he was, let’s say, 30 when I was born and so we were able to go to the seashore.
And my sister reminds me that we went really mid-June to mid-July because it was not the high season; it was less expensive to rent a little house on the seashore. What else can I say about that time?
Well, if you are talking about my father’s business, I might jump ahead, but with the laws against Jews, first the doctors, the lawyers, the people in those professions, had to relinquish their positions. And then businessmen and my father was forced to sell his business. He was not allowed to work. But that was in ’41 after the war broke out.
Bill Benson:
In March of 1939, if I have this correct, your parents had you and your sister declared French citizens. Tell us about that. Why was that done at that point, particularly?
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Right. That’s a law actually since, I think, on my certificate it says 1927. Even though we were born in France—we were both born in Paris, my sister and I, and then my brother later was born in France as well—we had to be (or maybe we didn’t have to be)…my parents preferred for us to be declared French.
And I always feel that they sensed something horrible was going to happen and they wanted to make sure that at least the two children, my sister and I, would be French citizens, hoping that what might happen to them wouldn’t happen to us. Of course, they were wrong because they could just as well deport us to concentration camps as they would them.
But anyway, I have that certificate, it’s hanging on the wall, and it’s very interesting, that my father signed and I was declared a French citizen. But I remained Dutch until my 21st birthday, at which time I would have had to choose to be French or Dutch.
Bill Benson:
So you had a dual citizenship?
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Yes, absolutely.
Bill Benson:
So your parents were not considered French citizens?
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
No, they were Dutch. They remained—my mother became Dutch upon marriage and they remained Dutch for the rest of their lives. My father was very attached to his Dutch citizenship and he voted for Holland and he joined the Dutch Club and this is how he found those passeur, actually, through the Dutch Underground organization.
But I asked my father several times, “Don’t you want to become French?” and “No.” But my father came to Paris in 1926 as a very young man, he was 21, and he was really like a Frenchman, really. My mother now and I say that it really helped after my parents were interrogated, after crossing the demarcation line and my parents were arrested, the fact that my parents were not refugees, they were established.
My father had a business (which he had to relinquish), but he had also what is called a certificat de travail, a work permit, which had to be renewed, since 1926. And so I don’t believe they considered themselves foreigners.
Bill Benson:
That clearly must have made a big difference in helping them to survive for a while, as opposed to if they had been viewed as refugees from the get-go.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Yes, well, if we jump to 1942 after we crossed the demarcation line, my parents were arrested and interrogated. And when we went back to Périgueux, which is the head of the government of that département—it’s like the capital of a state, if you want, in this country—my parents were interrogated and of course they were declared illegal and they had to pay a heavy fine.
They were not allowed to travel as Jews. They were allowed to have a permit, but Jews could not get a permit. But my father declared that he had a certain amount of money on him, plus that he had a friend in Lyon, on the southeast of France, that had more money and some jewelry.
And I have a very strong feeling that that was his business partner, who was a very good person, who was holding money. My father was interrogated at 8:30 p.m. My mother was interrogated at 8:45 p.m. I have copies of those documents.
So it was a very short interrogation in Ribérac, which was the sub-prefecture. It was the city below in importance from Périgueux. My mother declared that she had the same amount as my father, I believe, but she didn’t say anything about Lyon or any money there.
So that interrogation took place and then we were transported by police from Ribérac to Périgueux and we had to find a place…
Bill Benson:
Let’s just come back to that in just a minute, if we can. After the war broke out in September of 1939, you’d left Paris for a second time, but returned after a short period. In May 1940, the following spring, Germany invaded Holland, Luxembourg and Belgium and then quickly followed that by invading France in June of 1940.
You then fled Paris for a third time, but would again return to Paris. Tell us why your family decided to return to Paris each time and what your life was like once you came back after that third exit from Paris.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Well, my parents fled. My father took a little van from his office because in 1940 he was still allowed to go there, and my sister and I took our dolls—each a doll, which we still have, our best doll—and my mother took her sewing machine and my father took his typewriter. They felt that, well, wherever they would end up, they would be able to get a job.
But anyway, we ended up in the sort of the center, west of France, and my father stopped in front of a little house and asked if he could rent a room, and that wonderful family that we found again said of course, and they gave us their dining room and their bedroom and never accepted any money. But then Paris was declared open city…
Bill Benson:
So the reason you had fled at that point was because the war was on, the Germans had come in to Paris, and you weren’t alone in fleeing that time, were you?
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
No, there were millions—six, eight million [people]—not necessarily Jews; people that came from the north of France, from the east because the Germans invaded Alsace-Lorraine, and so those people just fled. Everybody was so scared.
Let’s not forget that France had survived World War I, but I think there were five million French soldiers that had died, and the French people, most of them, hated the Germans. They called them les boches, and they simply hated the Germans. And there, such a short time after 1918, was another invasion.
Bill Benson:
I have this image, as we see in modern times, movies about refugees in the millions choking the roads, and there you were.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Exactly, and I don’t know we…for the way south, my father had enough gasoline, and as I said, we spent a few weeks, maybe two or three weeks, and as soon as my father or my parents heard that Paris was open and the Germans were there of course, my father said, “I have to go back. I have to earn a living.”
And there was no more gasoline, but miraculously, in one of those little towns called Vierzon, there was a stock of gasoline that the British apparently had sent or airlifted or something, because the British were hoping to…of course even and we know that Dunkirk prevented the British from staying and actually, they were evacuated.
But the gasoline was there and the French were going to just burn the whole thing because they didn’t want the Germans to get hold of that gasoline. So my father and other refugees were told about that and they went with their jerry cans and filled the jerry cans and then we were able to drive back to Paris, and we went back to Paris.
Bill Benson:
When you say an open city, what did that mean? Germans are in control of Paris, but what did an open city mean?
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
That means they stopped bombing, bombarding, because before they went into Paris, there were many evenings where we had to go down to the cellar because there were bombardments, and we had to have those gas masks because everybody remembered from the first World War, the gas. So we went down to the cellar.
But as soon as Paris was opened and the Germans were there, they actually requisitioned all the big hotels and they settled down. They had the Gestapo, they had the abwehr, you know, the espionage. So they were there but the French were there too and the Parisians went back.
Bill Benson:
And for your father, it was largely a matter of he had to earn a living so he went back.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn: Yes.
Bill Benson:
At one point, there was a possibility, because of your Dutch nationality, being able to escape to a Dutch colony. What happened there?
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Well, I have to backtrack just a little bit. My father wrote to his cousin who had moved to what was then Palestine that he was going to join the Dutch free forces in England, and then was the declaration of war. All men were either going to war or had to stay on the territory and there was no way for my father to leave and join the Dutch forces.
And actually, he said (he wrote that), “I don’t know how I can do that and leave Ellen with the two little girls to survive on their own.” Anyway, it was not possible, but my father heard that the queen of Holland, it was Queen Wilhelmina, was going to help the Jews in distress, or the Dutch in distress, to go to one of the colonies and for us, it was Curacao.
My sister and I remember that we were going to go to Curacao and then actually I found out not so long ago that the queen of Holland was not really helping. In any case, with the demarcation line that you saw on the map, Bordeaux, which would have been the port of exit, was occupied by the Germans.
And I don’t know, if we could have found a ship, if we could have gone all the way to Central America, and if the colonial government would have taken us in. So it was a big dream. I know my Dutch cousins, and I found out very recently, their parents were trying to go to Cuba, and when Holland was occupied, then of course, they couldn’t get a visa.
So they were trying to get to Cuba, we were trying to get to Curacao and nothing happened. And at one time we were supposed to go to Switzerland and then Marseille and then something, but my parents really tried to get out of France and to save us all.
Bill Benson:
And every time, a door would just close.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Exactly. I want to mention something, that in 1938, my father (my mother asked him) went to Hamburg, Germany, where my grandmother lived and tried to get her out of Germany and she wouldn’t. My father said, “I’ll never step a foot in Germany again,” because the swastika and all the buildings were covered with the flag and it was very scary.
And my grandmother had a grand piano and a comfortable living, and like many other German Jews she said, “Oh, nothing will ever happen,” and that was 1938. But what happened is that in 1941, her apartment was taken. She ended up in a home that belonged to the Jewish community because there were no real ghettos in Germany.
Anyway, she committed suicide. She took four and a half tubes of Viranol in November 1941, and that’s something I should talk about later, maybe.
Bill Benson:
Yes, we’ll want to come back to that. Jacqueline, we saw the map with the line of demarcation showing the Vichy France, the free zone and the occupied zone. Explain to all of us what Vichy France was. What did an unoccupied portion of France mean even though the Germans had attacked France?
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Yes, well, Hitler and that marshal, Marshal Pétain, who was revered because of the First World War, signed…
Bill Benson:
He was the head of France?
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
No, he was not the head of France; he was appointed the head of France after the armistice. And they signed that pact that Germany was going to occupy that northern portion of France and of course, Alsace-Lorraine, and then it was not the northern because they went all the way to Spain—Bordeaux and then west.
Then the Italians were occupying and they were much nicer actually than the Germans. They were occupying the area around Nice and Marseille. But that demarcation line, that was a real border and you had to have a permit to pass it, and officially, Pétain was in charge with his minister, the infamous Laval, and many other ministers who obeyed the German orders actually, mostly against the Jews.
For example, after we had crossed, we were not allowed to get any packages or even mail from the so-called occupied zone versus the so-called unoccupied zone, so it was really a border and many people tried to cross it illegally and many were caught.
And I haven’t said that yet, but when the Americans entered into North Africa, which was in November 1942, Hitler decided to punish France, and on the day of the armistice of World War I, which was November 11, 1942, he said, “Okay, we are occupying all of France.”
So we were not safe at all. We had two and a half months in the so-called unoccupied zone. And I say so-called because even during that time, Jews were rounded up in the so-called unoccupied zone.
Bill Benson:
Or even called a free zone.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Yes, zone libre in French, right.
Bill Benson:
And put into detention camps and deported.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Oh yeah, right.
Bill Benson:
When your father chose to go back to Paris, to the occupied area, did many Jews go back to Paris?
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Oh, you’re talking about the end of the war?
Bill Benson:
No, I mean when you fled out of Paris with the exodus, then he returned to Paris.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Oh, the four of us returned to Paris. Well, I don’t know, I don’t have statistics. I know that Jews…I have a very good friend whose parents moved to Toulouse and they stayed in Toulouse and actually, the family was deported in Bergen-Belsen and the two youngest sisters of my friend survived.
They were the youngest French deportees at four and five, and they survived. But the father died of typhus and the mother was sleeping on top of the little girls to keep them warm and they made it. But in Toulouse, for example, it was very, very bad. So people were staying in the south, if you want, but they were not really safe.
Bill Benson:
It didn’t guarantee anything.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
No. Absolutely not.
Bill Benson:
You would continue living in Paris until the summer of 1942. That’s when your parents arranged for the four of you to leave the occupied zone, Vichy France, for a last time. Tell us about the events that led up to your parents’ decision to leave Paris for good, and how they were able to manage that, how you got out of Paris. And then, how you found your way to this small village of Le Got.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Well, first of all, I must say that my parents were marvelous because they never showed us their anxiety, their fright and if they cried it must have been at night, but they saw that it was getting more and more dangerous. There were so many laws against the Jews. We couldn’t go to parks.
My sister had started to take swimming lessons; swimming pools were forbidden for Jews. We couldn’t go shopping until 8:00 p.m. at night. There was a lack of food in Paris because all the food went to the Germans and there was no food left between 8:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m.
But in our little neighborhood, they knew the Mendels family and they kept some food for us so we were not hungry. There were so many restrictions. We couldn’t go to the movies, of course.
We could take the metro and my father took the metro to go to work, although he was not allowed to go to work, but he did. He had to travel in the last train of the metro. On his working permit and his ID card it said “JUIF” (JEW) in big, red printed letters.
Bill Benson:
He had to carry that ID card.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Of course, oh yes. We children, I don’t think so. We wore the Jewish star, but we didn’t have ID cards, I don’t think.
Bill Benson:
But your parents had them.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
As soon as the Germans were really in charge in Paris, the Jews were ordered to register at the local city hall, so they knew where the Jews were, where they lived, and they could have come, so it was really becoming more and more dangerous.
Everybody who studies Jewish history in World War II knows about the roundup of the Vèl' d'Hiv, the Vélodrome d’Hiver, which was a form of bicycle arena. The French police came in buses at 5:00 in the morning and rounded up Jews, and that was the 16th and 17th of July, 1942.
We were there, we were in Paris, but they didn’t come for us. I guess they had their quota or something. But they rounded up over 13,000 Jews and 4,000 children in those two days.
Bill Benson:
In that one roundup, two days.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
In those two days, and they took them to the Vèl' d’Hiv and then to Drancy and then ended up in Auschwitz. And if you go to Paris, you will see in those special neighborhoods of Paris, which is the third, the fourth, the tenth.
We were in Paris just last month and there’s a big plaque there of 500 children from this little area were deported for the simple reason that they were Jewish children and ended up in the death camps with the Nazi’s help and with the French government.
Bill Benson:
It was French police that actually did the rounding up.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Yes, French police, and we were there.
Bill Benson:
How do you think you were able to avoid that?
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
I mentioned that there was a quota and our little neighborhood was just like a little enclave between the twelfth and the twentieth arrondissements. There were fewer Jews, although I know of people that lived 15 minutes by foot that were arrested, so I think the buses were full or something. I keep on talking about miracle and I’m wearing that medal. [laughs]
Bill Benson:
Which we’ll get to talk about.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
But by that time, my parents…(I don’t have an exact date) but I’m sure that my father knew from the Dutch club, the names of those two passeur, those two young men that were supposed to take us across. And my parents told us, “We’re going on vacation,” and my sister and I were jumping with joy because after all, it was July, and on the 30th of July we left Paris, so see, very short after…
Bill Benson:
Very shortly after the roundup. I‘m going to take you back just a little bit. You mentioned about your grandmother’s suicide. There was a very strange incident that I think the audience would like to hear about, in which after her suicide, your mother got a call from an official from the German embassy. Just say a little bit about that.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Yeah, it was strange and scary for my mother. An official from the German embassy called her and wanted to meet her. My mother hesitated and she decided she was going to go and meet him in downtown Paris near the Louvre actually, in a café.
And my father was so scared and he said, “Well, I’m going with you. I’ll stay in the next table and I’ll see.” And he was a good person. He brought a ring to my mother from her mother and money, although we are not sure exactly, but it was that ring that my mother got from her mother.
Bill Benson:
And he was a German official.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
He was a German diplomat.
Bill Benson:
A diplomat.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Also, you should know that the mail worked between Germany and France because my mother got the letter saying that her mother was committing suicide and I have a copy of that letter.
And my grandmother Sophie also wrote to her brother, who had escaped from Sachsenhausen the camp to Brazil and we have recovered 20 letters of despair, saying “Help me. I’ll go anywhere. I’ll go to Shanghai, I’ll go to Cuba.” Her visa number was number 16,000, or 18,000. There was no way she would have been able to get out.
Bill Benson:
Number 18,000 on a list, wow.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Yeah, and the American consulate was no help at all. Eighteen thousand. And she saw that all…well, first of all, her apartment was taken and she was rounded up in some basement there and she saw that her friends, all Jews, were disappearing.
And a lot of German Jews committed suicide so she saw it coming and she said to her neighbor downstairs…and we have recovered in the German archives, you know, they are so organized, some information. The police came the next day and she said, “When I get the order to go to the…or the command to go to that central platz (as they say in German), then I’ll know.” And I don’t know how she got the Viranol.
Bill Benson:
That was the drug, the pills.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
The pills, yes. I don’t know—she must have had some friends that were doctors and pharmacists. I don’t know how my mother got it either for us.
Bill Benson:
Jacqueline, when you left Paris for that last time, you wrote in your memoir that the departure was handled very quietly. Things were moved out of your apartment at night, yet you also said that people in your apartment must have known you were leaving.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Absolutely. The concierge must have been a wonderful person, and the person who lived, I think, two flights of stairs from us. Madame Deneux, kept, I think, a lot of my parents’ belongings and she was a widow from World War I and she hated les boches, the Germans, and she helped us.
And then my mother, by that time, had a little spinet piano and my father and somebody else, in the middle of the night, it was pitch dark (it must have been early July) carried that piano downstairs (we were on the first floor European, so second floor American) to a neighbor across the yard that you saw, and that wonderful friend and neighbor kept the piano the whole war.
So my parents were able to…we didn’t know anything, my sister and I. I don’t know if the next morning we said, “Where is the piano?” I know I drew a piano from…[laughs]
Bill Benson:
You would have noticed that was missing somehow, when you woke up.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Yes. Right.
Bill Benson:
And then you would stay the night with some friends. That was significant and it also included getting your good luck token. Say a little bit about that.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Yes. We had those wonderful friends—my parents had those wonderful friends—since before my birth actually, and they risked their lives in helping us. My parents didn’t want to go to the metro. We were allowed to take the metro after 6:00 a.m. as Jews, but in the last train, of course.
And they said, you know, “Come and sleep over at our house because they don’t know you on that street and it’s very close to the metro stop. You can leave at 6:00 a.m. very quietly and nobody will know.”
In our apartment house, people could have looked out the window and something could have been said. You know, denunciation were of the order. As a matter of fact, it was an order from Pétain. “It is your duty to denounce…”
Bill Benson:
From the Frenchman, Pétain.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Yes.
Bill Benson:
Your duty to denounce Jews.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
To denounce Jews. So my parents accepted the offer of their very good friends. We went over there. I was so delighted. I was playing with my little friend that I just saw last spring. She is two years younger than me and we were playing, we shared our bed.
They went down to the cellar, even though it was July, the father, Maurice Paris is his name, burned our Jewish stars. We had dinner, and the next morning, we must have gotten up very early because we left at 6:00 a.m. for the train station.
Their son, Michel Paris, and the son of the lady, they were 15 years old, those two boys, were in the Underground, in the resistance, they had taken my parents’ backpacks. My parents decided they were going to travel.
It was not their style, but they were traveling with a backpack, with the most essential things, to get on the train. Let’s not forget, Jews were not allowed to travel, and my parents had their Jewish IDs.
Bill Benson:
They had the Jewish IDs but no stars.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
No stars. So we left that morning. That’s, I think, your question. I elaborate too much.
Bill Benson:
No, no.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
We left that morning, we said goodbye of course, very quickly, and we got on the metro and we stopped at the train station which is called la Gare d’Austerlitz, which takes people south, center south. Well, my parents retrieved their backpack, which had been left the night before by those two young men and they probably bought the tickets for my parents because my parents were not [allowed to ride yet].
We got on the train and the train wouldn’t leave. And I remember that. And the train wouldn’t leave. Well, I was seven years old by then. And my father got very anxious and went into the corridor and said, “Oh yeah, they are rounding up Jews there on that train, on the other side,” but they didn’t get to our train.
I should mention my medal because Madame [Paris], the wife, Geneviève Paris was her name, gave my sister and me and my mother, I’m sure, a medal, and on the verso, it says “Notre-Dame de Lourdes,” and if you know Lourdes in France, it’s a place where miracles occur. And so that wonderful Geneviève Paris thought this would help us.
Bill Benson:
And you have it today.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
And I have it! Yeah. I don’t really wear it; I keep it…
Bill Benson:
So they were rounding up Jews on the train but they didn’t get to your end.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Yes. They didn’t get to our train.
Bill Benson:
Again, they maybe filled the quota possibly.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Yes. Absolutely.
Bill Benson:
So from there you would make your way and end up eventually finding yourself in this little village of Le Got.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Not right away. [laughs]
Bill Benson:
No. Tell us how you found your way to Le Got.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Well, we had to change trains in a little town called Angoulême, which is on the map—not on your map, but on the maps of France. We had to change trains and it was pitch dark, and my sister fell and hit her head on the cement, and to this day, she remembers how it resonated in her head.
But miraculously (maybe that was all that), she didn’t hurt herself. And we jumped on the other train and got to a small village called Saint Aulaye and I believe we had to walk. We went to a hotel and then we got word from the passeur, “Uh-uh, we can’t take you.”
Bill Benson:
And the passeur were the people trying to help get you across the demarcation line.
JacquelineMendels Birn:
Yes, right. They were young farmer boys.
Bill Benson:
Passeur.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Meaning “passing, crossing,” if you want. And they couldn’t do it and I think we had to wait two days, and finally we were supposed to meet them in that little village at midnight under the tree next to the church. I remember that. It was, I think, August 1st and it was hot.
And my father wrote in my journal for some reason (they were carrying their backpacks), he and my mother had a bag with a hat and my father said later on, “Why on earth did we take a hat under those circumstances?” And I have a feeling they wanted to present themselves as real bourgeois, you know, we are honest people, we wear a hat.
In those days people wore hats when they weren’t outside. Anyway, so we met those passeur and we started walking and it was pitch dark, I don’t know if there were stars.
Bill Benson:
And you’re seven years old.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Right. And at one time, I remember seeing cigarette butts, the light, you know, and they’d say, “Get down on the ground,” and then my sister said, “I have to do pee-pee,” and they said, “Shh!” you know, and so we were lying down on the ground and it was very dangerous.
And then one of those passeur…they were on bicycles and we were walking. One of those passeur went ahead to make sure things were clear, because the Germans were very, very close.
Bill Benson:
On patrol and doing all of that, yeah.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Yes, absolutely. They were very nervous, I think I remember that, and the other passeur put Manuela and I, my sister and me, on his bicycle, so the two of us were on the bike, and my parents had to run behind. By that time, I guess we were off from the ground, you know.
And finally, we made it and we knew we made it and I can remember that voice, it was the French Army of Armistice. I think 100,000 soldiers were allowed to keep their arms in the free zone. I always say the so-called free zone. And they said, “Qui va là?”, “who goes there?” and it’s a typical military expression.
And the passeur must have said, “Well, it’s us and we have a family,” and they took us in and we spent the night there. My father went swimming in that little river the next morning and then they took us to Ribérac, the town, which is a sub-prefecture, a smaller town. It was not the middle of the night; we were in our bedroom and the police came to arrest my parents.
Bill Benson:
So now you’re in free France and you’re arrested.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Yeah, and we were Jews, we had crossed the demarcation line and I guess the Vichy authorities wouldn’t allow that. We were not allowed to do anything like that, and so my parents were interrogated and then under police escort, they took us to Périgueux.
In Périgueux, my parents were ordered to find a small village, less than 100 kilometers (less than 16 miles) from Périgueux and that village had to be acceptable by the authorities. And my father and my mother looked and looked and miraculously, they found a little ad in a window.
And I think we only had one month or three weeks where we had to find, otherwise they would have put us in detention camps. And there was somebody, Monsieur Maurial and he was renting two rooms in that little village, and the train still worked so we could go there.
And my father went to the authorities and I have the copy of the register where it says “assignés à domicile,” (now, how do you say in English?) We were not under house arrest. We were registered as our village was so-and-so in that place and they could come any day to get us, you know. But we were not under arrest and we were not prisoners, if you want.
Bill Benson:
But they knew exactly where you were.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Absolutely and it went all the way to Vichy, so they could have come at any time. So on that register (I didn’t know that at that time) that my daughter and I filmed actually, ten years ago, that’s where we see all those people that were refugees and without a passport anymore and they were put in detention camps.
But the Mendels family, well actually only my father and mother—we were not…I guess we were non-entity, we were too young—Dutch citizens. And that’s why I say my parents had a little money that my father declared. My father spoke absolutely like a Frenchman so when he was interrogated, he was a Frenchman; not my mother.
He was established in France since 1926 and that counted. And the Dutch, according to many historians, I’ve seen that in several books, Dutch citizens were treated better than Jews that were refugees from Eastern Europe. My parents were not refugees; they resided, my father had a business.
Bill Benson:
They were established in France.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
They were established, right.
Bill Benson:
So under that circumstance, you’re allowed to live in this village and you would then live there for the next two and a half years.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn: Yes.
Bill Benson:
I know it’s impossible to condense two and a half years in a short time, but tell us what happened in that two and a half years—what life was like, how you were able to manage to stay there while things were changing so dramatically around you during the war.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
I just want to say very, very briefly, that it was a horrible thing to say that my grandmother committed suicide (my mother’s mother) but if she had been with us, she already had arthritis, and she could not have crossed the demarcation line and we all would have died. So in a way, she helped us by committing suicide. That’s remarkable.
Anyway, so we got there and my sister and I had a duty. We had to go and fetch water at the pump across the railroad tracks and I was so scared. In the beginning, the train was still working, then the train was not working. And we were carrying the water home and I say in my memoir that we took a bath in the tub—the whole family, one after the other. [laughs]
Bill Benson:
In the same water.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
In the same water, right. Well, there was not much water.
Bill Benson:
You had to do what you had to do.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Yeah, right. My sister and I went to school in the beginning. In our village, it had 30 houses; it was not even a village. There was no school, there was no town hall, there was no church, there was nothing. That was all in the village which was about, maybe five kilometers, and that’s when we went to school and it was a steep hill for me to climb, but we went.
And we met again some of those little kids that are our ages now, my sister and I. And I have to mention that now, that my little friend Jeannot Martegoutte, and he’s now John Martegoutte, he became an important man, a [indiscernible] general, et cetera.
Anyway, he said, “You know, Jacqueline, I remember very well, you told us that your mother [cries] had poison and if the Germans came, she would give you…you would die instantly and you would never suffer,” and my sister has the same exact story and it’s so strange because we forgot it.
And then they told us that—her little friend and my little friend, and then the neighbor downstairs—that my mother was carrying poison and I have no idea what you give two little girls, and so I knew the Germans were bad people.
Actually, even when we lived in Paris, my mother told us never to open the door and of course, I disobeyed and I opened the door, but maybe I wasn’t wearing my Jewish star. Anyway, my mother was carrying a pill.
Bill Benson:
Like cyanide or something. One for each of you.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Yeah, we don’t know, and my mother never told us after the war. I have no idea, but she was going to kill us and I have a feeling that because her mother had done it, she probably said, “I’ll have the courage to do it,” and she would have done it. Maybe not my father, but the four of us would have perished and then afterward, my brother when he was born, I don’t know what she would have done. I don’t know.
Bill Benson:
In this little village, less than a village as you say, 30 houses, obviously everybody knew you were there.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn: Yes.
Bill Benson:
What was their understanding? Do you know what they thought of this family of four, and soon to be five, that was living in their midst?
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Well, that woman downstairs, actually she was a refugee from Lorraine, but she was not Jewish. I don’t know that they knew what Jews were, although I have that very sad anecdote that I told you, that once, only once, I was with two other little girls and one little girl told the other, “Aren’t you ashamed to play with a Jew who is dirty like a pig in a stable?” And I ran home to my mother, crying.
That is the only negative remark I heard. My sister says she never heard anything negative, not in the little school, not among the other farmers. You know, they were very poor but very honest people. The farmer where my father was a so-called farmhand and where he was in hiding, they gave us food.
Somebody else gave us eggs. We got milk. They gave us bread. My father had a little money. I don’t know how much, and until the end he probably had to pay some kind of rent for those two rooms, I don’t know. I don’t know.
Bill Benson:
In the midst of all that, your mother would end up having another child, your brother.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Yeah, and that was not a wanted child, I can tell you. Well, first of all, that other family, not that family [below, down] but on the other side, that man worked for the railroad and the Gestapo came and surrounded the house one day, and the whole village said, “Oh, that’s for the Mendels.”
But it was for him and he was arrested and interrogated and fortunately he was released. But my parents during that time, we were upstairs where we were, listening to the BBC (we still had a radio.) And that man could have said, “Well, instead of arresting me, why don’t you go upstairs?”
Bill Benson:
Yeah, “Leave me alone and take them.”
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
You see, that’s why I want to say that those people were very poor, very young, it was a very young village, and very honest. Oh, there were collaborators, as we called them, but not in our village. As a matter of fact, when there was going to be Germans passing by, patrolling, we were warned and several times we had to go and hide in the woods.
My parents wanted to put us in the convent and they said, “Don’t go,” and it was a good thing because that convent was raided later on. So everything that happened was a miracle and the villagers helped us and the mayor was a marvelous man. He got false papers for my parents. And well, other things. I can’t tell everything today.
You want to hear about my brother, so my mother became pregnant and my brother was born in August of ’43 and around May (and it’s in our journals, and I remember that too), my parents took each one of us on their knees and they said [cries], “You’re not going to get any presents for your birthday because we don’t have any money, but we’re going to have a visitor that’s going to stay with us for the rest of our lives,” and my sister guessed.
And she said, “Oh, so it’s going to be a baby.” I didn’t guess but of course, we were so happy, so happy. But he was a breech baby. My mother had a terrible pregnancy and terrible birth and she almost died and my brother almost died, but they made it, although my mother’s pregnancy was probably so awful that it affected my brother, who was a brilliant man, a historian in economics, but who committed suicide also when he was 44.
Bill Benson:
Your mother almost lost her life? She had to be transported?
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Yes, she had to be transported in the middle of the night. She was going to give birth in one of our two rooms, but with the breech birth it just wouldn’t work. And it was the middle of the night. I think I woke up. And so they managed to find a vehicle to transport her.
And my father wrote in the journal that actually the car broke up, but she made it to that hospital one hour away, where the doctor, le Dr. Boquet, was a surgeon actually, also, and he took care of, on one side the Germans because France was occupied, he took care of German soldiers that needed medical help.
And he took care of the resistance on the other side. So he, of course, risked his life, and then he took my mother in and my mother had a Caesarean, et cetera, and my parents, in those terrible times, had my brother circumcised, which was a mark for Jews. I don’t know why, but they did.
Bill Benson:
Your brother also couldn’t drink ordinary milk.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
That’s right. He had some kind of allergy. My mother was so sick, she had no milk, and he was so skinny. Maybe you saw that photo—his legs were like sticks. And miraculously, after three or four weeks, my father and my mother and the baby were able to come back to our village and we got milk from Switzerland in cans, Nestle condensed sweet milk.
I remember licking the bottle, oh, it was so good! [laughs] I didn’t steal it, the thing was empty, but I licked it. So my parents decided to name my brother Franklin because that was their only hope of survival. They said Franklin Roosevelt would save us, hopefully.
And if my brother had been a girl, they would have named her Marianne, which is, since the French revolution, the symbol of France. But it was a boy and he was Franklin.
Bill Benson:
Named after Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Jacqueline Menedls Birn:
Yes. Absolutely.
Bill Benson:
Pretty amazing.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
That was their hope of survival.
Bill Benson:
Before we get to the closing part of our program, I want to talk a bit more about how you got out of Le Got. For two and a half years, you’re in this community they know you, your parents have ID cards that are stamped with “JUIF” on them, which is “JEW” in French.
There are dangers around you—the Gestapo come through, the soldiers come through, collaborators, and yet in your village were people that were members of the resistance and somehow or another, you survived all of that, under the most arduous of circumstances.
So in 1944, your father is picking cherries, as I recall, and he gets word of D-Day.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Right, and he fell from the tree out of joy. It was one of those days when he was not in hiding, because when we went back to the village they showed us that he didn’t really work much as a farmhand; he was really, most of the time, in hiding in a cellar of a dilapidated ruin, and he couldn’t stand and he couldn’t lie. It must have been horrible.
And I remember my father, once when he was hiding in the woods and he came home, and his beard was all white. First of all, he couldn’t shave and then it was all white, and you know, for a little girl, it was a shock to see my father like that. Anyway, so that was D-Day and you can imagine how…
And of course, there was no more school. The master of the school was in the Underground himself, and so we were home. It was by no means the end of the war. It actually became even more dangerous then because the Germans, as they retreated, they were shooting right and left, so it was extremely dangerous, not only for Jews but for the resistance.
There are many stories of terrible crimes committed after the landing in Normandy, in that village in particular of Oradour. They killed everybody, put the people in the church and, oh! Horrible, horrible things. And we were not denounced and we made it.
Bill Benson:
In August, Paris would be liberated.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Yeah, the 28th of August, or the 25th of August.
Bill Benson:
And that’s when your father decided to go back to Paris.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Right. Shortly after, not immediately, because it was impossible. The rails had been bombed, there was nothing, but he made it, I believe in September. I’m not quite sure when. It doesn’t say so in his memoirs.
And he went because my father was a very smart, very intelligent person and he said, “I have to get back. I have to look at my business,” which was in shambles, “and I have to see what happened to the apartment.” And this was extremely smart of him because the first refugees to come back to Paris were the first ones that were given housing.
Bill Benson:
Whatever was available.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Exactly. And just last night I was talking to a friend who lived with the same story and they came back too late—their apartment was already taken and they had to move in a terrible, terrible place. So the Germans had left. My father—it was the concierge, I don’t know—took the apartment and was told to go to city hall and see if he could retrieve some of our furniture, which he did.
And I remember there was a mattress from my parents’ bed that was slit like that on the side because the Germans were probably looking for money or jewelry, who knows. But that was the least of my parents’ worries. And my father made it back; I don’t know how, made it back to Le Got.
And finally on November 16 (and my sister is the one who wrote it in her journal), we all left and apparently the whole village came to wave us goodbye at the station and the headmaster from the school—it was a school with two classrooms, you know. And then one classroom and then no more classroom.
Anyway, they took us and there were many…I think it took two days to get back to Paris. The few trains that worked were jam-packed and we were considered une famille nombreuse, a family with many…my brother was in my mother’s arms, so we were five.
So we were given priority and my father says we have to stop in Périgueux and we were so well received this time. And we were able to get new ID cards with no more “JUIF” stamp.
So we took that train and the next train and after two days, I think the middle of the night, we arrived in Paris. Our friends, our very good friends, the [Paris’], were there waiting for us and we stayed with them before we could go back to our apartment.
Bill Benson:
And at that point, then begin to try to build a new life, but yet war would continue in Europe until the following April.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn: Yes.
Bill Benson:
Was there a tremendous sense of security or was there fear the Germans could come back?
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
That’s an interesting question. I wouldn’t know that. It’s true, it was extremely early—mid-November, 1944—and I’d have to look in some books to see where the Germans were in the [Ardennes] by that time, but many people still died then.
And of course, my parents had no idea…my father wrote to his cousin in Ramat Gan, which is outside of Tel Aviv, saying, “We made it, we’re alive,” and he was corresponding through the Red Cross at that time. And I trust that our family in Holland went into hiding like we did and survived and little by little they found out.
Bill Benson:
The truth.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
My grandmother died in Sobibor, they died in Sobibor, in Auschwitz, and our closest family all perished and it was very hard.
Bill Benson:
A couple of last questions before we close, Jacqueline. You found out after the war that when you left Paris to go to Le Got, it was shortly after that that the Germans actually came to your apartment to get you.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Yes, one week after we left, they came to get us, and we don’t know if they came…because my mother was born a German Jew and German Jew, as it stipulated in the armistice between Pétain and Hitler, German Jew, of course, were enemy of the Reich.
So there was a law that all German Jews were supposed to be sent back to Germany. So we don’t know if they came for my mother or they came for the four of us because we were Jews, but they came. And after that, the apartment was sealed and then it was occupied by the Germans.
Bill Benson:
Both when the war ended for you in 1944, and then when the war was fully over in Europe in 1945, you would continue to live in France, in Paris, until meeting Richard and coming to the United States in 1958. Were your father and mother able to get back on their feet? What happened to them after the war after all they had done to keep you together as a family unit?
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
I don’t know. They must have been very strong after all the terrible tragedy, and my mother, she never talked very much but she always used the adjective, which is the same in English and in French, “terrible.” “Terrible, terrible, terrible.” And she didn’t really want to tell so much, but my parents had this willpower to make it.
As my parents told us, or my father told us, at first he was selling jam from door to door to try and make some money. And we got clothes from America. There was a hotel or two…and I always said I looked like a little American girl because I was wearing hand-me-downs from American children.
There was a Polish woman helping my mother and she worked for the Americans and she brought white bread and Skippy peanut butter! [laughs]
Bill Benson:
And you liked it, right?
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
I didn’t know what it was and I loved it! And nobody in the family, I think my father, but I thought it was delicious! [laughs]
Bill Benson:
Last question before I say a few closing words and turn back to Jacqueline. Share with us the toast your parents would make on Sundays when you were in Le Got.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
It was really painful. Every Sunday, and I don’t know when my parents really started it, but they would lift their glass, and I don’t know if it was water or they had wine, and they said, “A dimanche prochain,” meaning, “Let’s be alive next Sunday.” [cries]
But my sister and I just, we thought it was, I don’t know, fine or something. We didn’t cry or anything, but imagine, “Dimanche prochain,” so at least they were optimistic for one week. And may I say just one thing?
Bill Benson:
Please.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
That ring, that I never wear—it’s very heavy—my father and my mother both had this ring, and when we crossed the demarcation line, there was a saying in French, and I’m sure in English too, “You give your money or your life.”
And my parents were hoping that if they gave the gold to whoever, that they would get their life. So I don’t know if my sister still has it, but I have this one, which I keep in a drawer. It’s very heavy.
Bill Benson:
And fortunately they didn’t have to do that.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
That’s right. The passeur were good guys. You know, some of those passeur were very bad people; they took money from us and then they took money from the other side. They made double money and the Jews were [on to that].
Bill Benson:
It makes you think of the “mules” that bring immigrants over the border in the United States. They get paid big sums of money. Some get them over there and leave them in bad conditions, but get them over there, and others just take the money and leave them to their fate.
I want to thank all of you for being here today and thank Jacqueline for being willing to share what is a profound and very painful story for her and her family. Obviously, we can only just really truly touch the surface. I wish we had more time.
Before I turn back to Jacqueline to wrap up our program, I’d like to remind you again that we do this every Wednesday through August 27th, plus Tuesdays in June and July, so we’ll have another First Person program tomorrow, June 11th, when our First Person will be Mr. David Bayer. Mr. Bayer is from Poland, survived a ghetto, Auschwitz, Birkenau, labor camps and a death march.
So we hope that you will, if you can, come back and join us at another time between now and the 27th of August. It’s our tradition at First Person that our First Person gets the last word. So with that, I’m going to turn back to Jacqueline to close the program.
We didn’t have time for questions and answers, so Jacqueline will be available over here when we finish, so if anybody wants to come up afterwards and say hi, talk to her, ask a question, absolutely feel free to do that. So with that, let me turn the program over to Jacqueline.
Jacqueline Mendels Birn:
Sometimes we people that have survived feel, enough of that, let’s not talk about the past, let’s talk about the future. Let’s talk about the survival, of course, of Israel and of the Jews, and let’s talk about the survival and normal, healthy live for everybody on this planet, which is not happening.
And what I hope, and my friends who also speak hope, is that this indeed, will be a lesson in teaching especially young people that hate is a word that should disappear from the surface of the earth, because we see what hate did to people, in particular concerning that monster that Hitler was.
So maybe with Holocaust museums that have been built in many, many countries, including in Germany, that the young generation will learn that something absolutely horrible happened and we don’t want it to happen again.
And unfortunately, it has happened in some African countries, think of Burundi, and some countries in the former Yugoslavia and between Tibet and China. Name it—there are so many horrible happenings in many different countries. We’re trying to talk to explain that this should not happen. So let’s remove that word hate from our vocabulary. I think those are the words I want to say.
Bill Benson:
Thank you. Thank you, Jacqueline.
