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legal activities tolerated by Vichy and what had
become OSE's true mission: the physical preservation of the Jewish population,
and especially its children, using whatever means were necessary. The growing
severity of anti-Jewish persecution pushed OSE officials to create an
underground network that could continue to operate despite surveillance and
efforts by the Nazis and Vichy to root it out.
The Vel d'Hiv roundups
of July 1942 in Paris, in which women and children were arrested for the first
time – in fact, they made up nearly 10,000 of the 13,000 Jews seized
– marked a turning point. The Vel d'Hiv captives were put on freight
trains for deportation to Auschwitz within weeks, and it was becoming evident
that these journeys had a terrible conclusion – not resettlement or forced
labor but extermination. Responding to the growing number of parents who wanted
their children hidden, OSE set up an office in Paris disguised as a social
club. Children who visited the "club" left it to be placed with Christian
families, with OSE workers monitoring their care and subsidizing their foster
families. The placements were made in close cooperation with other Jewish
organizations and with non-Jewish individuals and groups who, unsolicited,
provided many forms of aid. OSE also provided false identity papers and ration
coupons for children and adults alike if they were needed. In all, some700
children were successfully hidden by OSE in the Occupied Zone.
The
great wave of roundups, arrests, and deportations aimed at foreign Jews spread
to the Vichy Zone in August following the Vel d'Hiv arrests. Carried out by
French police, who seized thousands of people, they con- firmed the gloomiest
of expectations. The first groups of Jewish internees transferred from the
Vichy Zone to Drancy for deportation were allowed to leave behind their
children under 16, and OSE, together with the EIF, the American Friends Service
Committee, the YMCA, the Swiss agency Secours Suisse, and Amitié
Chrétienne, a non-denominational Christian group active in underground
work, set up an emergency program to feed, clothe, and shelter these children.
At Vénissieux, a temporary camp near Lyons, on August 28, OSE workers
were able to persuade interned parents awaiting transfer to Drancy to give up
108 children and spirited them out of the camp and into the care of
Amitiés Chrétiennes. When the Lyons regional prefect realized
there had been a mistake and demanded that Cardinal Gerlier, the Lyons
archbishop, send the children back, he was told they were hidden and would not
be returned.
But OSE children's homes were an easy target. Beginning in
late August 1942, French gendarmes and police surrounded several homes,
arresting some children over 16 of German, Austrian, Czech, Russian, and Polish
origin; most of these children had come to France to escape the Nazis and had
been in the OSE homes for a few years. The police also picked up younger
children whose parents were in the camps – on the hypocritical pretext of
reuniting them with their families – before sending them off, either alone
or with their families, to their deaths.
The German military move into
the previously unoccupied Vichy Zone in the south in November 1942 destroyed
whatever illusions remained. From now on police operations against Jews would
be coordinated throughout the country; immediately, the German police ordered
each prefecture to post
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FRENCH
CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST A memorial
Serge Klarsfeld
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