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lists of foreign Jews residing in its department. The
result was a panic and a new round of Jewish migration in France, this time to
the zone of Italian occupation in the southeast.
OSE facilities in the
south were reorganized to confront the new reality. The children's homes and
social-medical centers were maintained, but some also organized clandestine
border crossings, the production of false identity papers, and hideouts for
fugitive children. Capitalizing on OSE's official status, social workers
continued to go into assembly camps to observe conditions and screening
procedures. They attempted to block or delay deportation of those whose cases
could be pleaded and those who had a chance of escape. They succeeded in
winning the release of a few groups of children, but in most cases no help was
possible.
By the end of 1942, a firm decision had been made to
transform OSE into a primarily clandestine organization in which "shadow"
offices would mirror the legal organization but would use every means, however
illegal, to protect and hide children. Despite its incorporation into the UGIF,
OSE leaders more and more opposed the UGIF's insistence on legality. By 1943,
most OSE personnel were working in secret and illegal operations.
Harsh
French and German police actions struck in Marseilles and Rouen in January1943.
The Rouen raids netted 220 Jews, among them 45 children; the Marseilles action
resulted in 1,642 internments, 782 of them Jews who were transferred by the
Germans to Compiègne for deportation. Following the Marseilles raids,
which were carried out by French police under German control and in which the
<<incorrigible>> neighborhood adjacent to the Old Port was
dynamited on Himmler's orders, OSE began organizing rural escape routes and
supply lines in the south. Adults by the hundreds were given false papers at
the Marseilles OSE dispensary, where welfare and medical activities were now no
more than a facade. At the same time, groups of children and adults began
leaving for Switzerland, guided by OSE workers in liaison with the EIF and
other groups; almost every week, children were accompanied from Marseilles,
Nice, and Aix-en-Provence to the Swiss border.
OSE operations in Lyons
suffered critical losses in a Gestapo raid on the city's UGIF offices on
February 9, 1943. Ninety Jews were seized at the offices, among them two OSE
medical workers, Dr. Pierre Lanzenberg and Marcelle Loeb; the other staff
members went underground. Though reduced in number, the staff managed to
maintain OSE's principal activities in Lyons, to expand programs in Grenoble,
and to get work started in Chambéry, where from February 1943 the
organization was headquartered. Grenoble and Chambéry were in the
relatively protected Italian Zone and these OSE centers rapidly gained in
importance.
As the Milice, the Vichy political police, became more
active in central France in 1943, some older children were moved to the Italian
Zone. Uneasy at keeping so many Jewish children together and vulnerable to
arrest in the homes, OSE tried to thin out the most overcrowded. But no sooner
would a few beds be freed than other children would be delivered by panicky
families. Shutting down the homes, dispersing the children, and putting an end
to OSE's official activities were all debated. Only the impossibility of making
a thousand children disappear overnight com- […pelled]
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FRENCH
CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST A memorial
Serge Klarsfeld
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