Why am I still around when so many others are gone? I have asked myself this question so many times.
In 1942–43, my father was sent by the Nazis and their French collaborators to a forced labor camp on the Channel Island of Aurigny (Alderney in English). My mother was terrified that at any moment they could come and take us away, as they did so many people.
This is when she met Madame Galop, whom she did not know, but felt she could open up to. She shared our situation with her. Madame Galop told her husband, and the next day, he came to help us. We took whatever we could from our home and went to live with the Galops.
The Galops were a Protestant family. We did not know them, but they opened their home to my mother, my sisters, and me. We shared our meals with them and slept in their home like we were part of their family. We lived like that for about six months, until a neighbor asked Madame Galop, “When are you going to get rid of that scum?” At that point, my mother and Madame Galop thought we might be in danger staying there, and we went back home.
Then, sometime in June, two police inspectors visited and told my mother they had come to take us away, but moved by my mother, or maybe feeling that the war was over for them, they let us go. This happened more or less at the time of the Allies’ invasion on the beaches of Normandy. They recommended that my mother not sleep at home because the Gestapo or other police inspectors might come.
Then one morning my mother woke us up, and we went to see a social worker for help. This social worker, Mademoiselle Déjeubert, told us that she needed a couple of days to find a hiding place for each one of us, which she did, placing my mother as a governess with a family with many children near the Eiffel Tower and my sisters and me in Catholic boarding schools in a suburb east of Paris. We stayed there until we were liberated.
So, we have many people to be grateful to: the Galop family, the Ménétriers, our next-door neighbors, in whose apartment I stayed with my mother. I’m so grateful to the lodge keeper who offered asylum to my sisters, and the Catholic boarding schools where my sisters and I stayed until our liberation. My only regret is not having been able to find out the name of the schoolteacher in the boarding school where I stayed, who treated me as her protégé. I was only six, the youngest child in that school. I would have loved to have her recognized as a Righteous Among the Nations, if only I had been able to find her name.
These are all the people I am grateful to for saving my life and the lives of my mother and my sisters. I am also grateful to the World War II American soldiers who liberated France and without whom I would not be here. I owe my life to all these people, and I therefore have good reasons to be grateful to all of them.
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