|
A social worker from the OSE [Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants] came
to see my mother and explained that there was a village...uh...Le
Chambon...who was looking to help young people, to take them out of
the camp and would she agree to let me go. And my mother asked me
whether I would want to go, and I said, "Of course." And she never
said "but I will miss you. I don't want to go...you to go" or
anything like that. She let me go. She loved me enough to let me
go. Because there were parents who did not. You're looking at me.
Yes. There were parents who did not let their children go. As
incredible as it sounds, they held on. My mother let me go,
and...uh...together with six other young people, teenagers, we set
off beginning of September 1941 to go to Le Chambon. And Le Chambon
was, of course, heaven. We were free. We lived in a home, primitive
as it was, it still was a house. Uh...the food, of course was much
better. In fact, in the beginning we couldn't eat all the bread
that we got. Not that it was such tremendous amount of bread, but
it was more than we could eat. And so we would toast it very, very
hard and make little packages and send it back to camp because our
constant worry was what was going on in camp. So we would make, all
of us, little packages and send them.
|
