RESISTERS
HANDOUT 7B
SIMONE HELPS CHILDREN

Simone was born in 1920 in a small village in northeast France called Ringendorf. At age three, she and her family moved to the larger nearby city of Strasbourg. After graduating from high school in 1938, Simone trained at a school of social work where she studied early childhood education. Her education ended after the Germans invaded France in May 1940. One month later France surrendered, and the country was divided into two parts. Simone’s family was expelled by the Germans from Strasbourg along with all other Jews. Eventually they found a farmhouse in the southwest of France in the Free Zone, where her parents and brother, along with several other relatives lived until late in the war.

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Text Box: USHMM: courtesy Simone Weil Lipman Children cared for by the OSE in the Rivesaltes transit camp, southern France, 1942

So I packed my bags and came. I was twenty-one years old. I had no idea what to expect at Rivesaltes. I hadn’t even known these camps existed. I was shocked at conditions there. People were malnourished, inadequately clothed, and living in filthy rat-infested quarters. We set up infirmaries, clinics, and nurseries, and created programs for children and teenagers.

At this time OSE workers could take children under the age fifteen out of the camps and place them in children’s homes. To be released from an internment camp, a child had to have a residence permit authorized by a local government official. Some local officials found ways to help us, despite the orders of the Vichy Government. First, however, we had to persuade the parents in the Rivesaltes camp to let their children go. The deportations had not yet started. Understandably, the parents, not realizing the grave dangers they faced, were reluctant to be separated from their children.

Massive Deportations Begin
By August 1942, buses and trucks unloaded their human cargo daily at the internment camps. Rivesaltes became a central collection point for deportations. People were told they would be sent to work camps, but that wasn’t true. The trains went to the death camps in Poland. At this time, some Jews could still escape deportation, depending on their nationality, date of arrival in France, service in the French army, and a few other such factors. For example, Jews with one non-Jewish parent might be allowed to remain. We scrambled to provide people in the camps with documents that would help them.

In our work at Rivesaltes we were aided by other relief agencies, the French Resistance, and the Jewish scouting movement. The Jewish scouting movement became a laboratory for falsifying documents and escorting people to safe places and across borders. Taking children out of the camps was now strictly forbidden. The Nazis and their French collaborators had ordered that Jewish families be kept together for their “resettlement to the East.” The French police even took children from the children’s homes after the parents had been tricked by the police into giving them their children’s addresses.

Conditions Worsen and Danger Increases
By November 1942, all of France was occupied by the Germans. Rivesaltes was emptied out and I took a job in one of the children’s homes taking care of the children whom we had gotten out of the camp. We cared for around fifty children. In spite of the risks, the police alerts, the lack of food, we tried to make life in the home as normal as possible.

Children’s Homes Closed
By early 1943, the French police were taking children over age sixteen from the children’s homes. The homes were easy targets for police roundups, because they were known to house Jewish children. The Germans conducted house searches and made mass arrests. OSE offices were raided and had to be moved many times. Now French Jews like myself were as much at risk as foreign-born Jews. How foolish we had been to think we would escape persecution.

In the summer of 1943 we learned that the children’s homes would soon be closed. We had to act quickly. OSE formed a secret network to place the Jewish children under assumed names in non-Jewish surroundings. The homes began to forge false identity papers and organize secret border crossings into Switzer-land and Spain for the older teenagers. Everywhere frightened Jewish parents clamored for false papers and entrusted their children to OSE.

Going Underground
The new OSE operation needed workers, and I was eager to join. What were the qualifications? None, really. You had to do it and be able to blend in physically with the non-Jews around you. I began by changing my identity. I took a different name and obtained a false birth certificate, an identification card, and most importantly, ration cards for food and clothing. By then a network of people forging false papers existed, so we had access to blank identification cards. I made my place of birth the town of Toul because I knew that Toul’s city hall had been bombed and all the documents had disappeared.

Changing my prewar student card and library cards was easy, but to make my new identity more believable, I needed the help of my former professors at the school of social work in Strasbourg. I went to see them. Without asking me any questions, they agreed at once to help me. They got me a diploma under my false name and a certificate stating that I was their student in 1938. These documents later helped to save my life when I got into a tight spot. I also needed a cover. The local Department of Public Health listed me as a member of its staff and gave me the documents to prove it. I went there only once to see what the place looked like in case I needed to describe it.

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Simone’s false ID from 1943-44

Finding New Hiding Places
With my new identity established, I moved to Chateauroux, a safe city some seventy-five miles north of Limoges and began my real job, helping to find safe places and new identities for children escaping from the Nazis. One of the first people to assist us was the Archbishop of Toulouse. The archbishop had already spoken out from the pulpit against the discriminatory measures against Jews. He immediately gave his support to our project, helping to find homes for twenty-four children in Catholic convents, orphanages, and private schools. Soon we were combing the entire southern zone for Christian children’s homes and even summer overnight camps willing to take Jewish children under false names.

The bewildered children came day and night, carrying whatever possessions they had. They traveled in small groups supervised by a social worker. We found temporary shelter for them until permanent housing could be arranged, and coached them in their new identities before taking them to new families. When, as sometimes happened, a false identity broke down, the children had to be moved at once and placed elsewhere for everyone’s safety.

Sometimes children came to us who were being smuggled into neutral countries, particularly Switzerland. We got them false papers, took the labels out of their clothes and went through their luggage removing any traces of their true identities. I took them from Chateauroux to Lyons. Then someone else helped them cross into Switzerland. More than a thousand children were smuggled from France to Switzerland this way. Coded lists of the children’s real and false names compiled by OSE workers were kept in Geneva, ensuring that the children could be traced even if all the OSE workers were killed.

Nothing Out of the Ordinary
In February 1944, the Gestapo raided OSE headquarters. All the OSE offices and medical centers were closed. Workers were captured and shot as hostages or died in battles between the French Resistance and the Gestapo. Despite this, OSE’s work continued.

During those years, I was rarely frightened. I was young and felt sort of invulnerable, not thinking beyond what I had to do. There was a job to be done and I did it. None of us felt we were doing anything extraordinary or particularly brave. So many of my peers were doing the same kind of work. We did it because it was the thing to do.

Around this time I was arrested in Limoges by the French militia, a special police unit dedicated to finding Jews and members of the French Resistance. Limoges was the headquarters for OSE work in my area and I had to go there from time to time. I was walking down the street with a co-worker when a young Frenchman came up to us and said, “Follow me.” Under his arm, he carried a gun. He belonged to the French militia which suspected my friend of being in the resistance. He marched us to my friend’s apartment and began ransacking her rooms. Neither of us knew exactly what he was looking for, but sewn into the lining of my suit pocket were the seals of town halls used in making false papers. I also had a coded list of my hidden children.

Fast Thinking in a Dangerous Situation
As I watched the French militia man tear apart my friend’s apartment, I thought about how to get rid of the incriminating documents. I asked permission to go to the bathroom and they let me go. That simple little slip on their part saved me. In the bathroom, I removed everything from the lining of my pocket, and flushed most of it down the toilet. The rest I threw out the window. When I came back into the room, they went through my papers but I was okay. I had my diplomas, my university student card, and my library card with the false names. Luckily no one asked me about the address in Limoges on my identification card. I didn’t even know where the street was. If they had asked me to take them there, I couldn’t have done it, but they didn’t and I was saved. The militia let me go, but not my friend.

In September 1944, the war was over for us in southern France. OSE reopened its doors and we took the children out of the convents and homes that had hidden them and brought them to a large chateau in central France. We celebrated as the search for the children’s surviving relatives began. Months passed before the Allies reached the death camps in Poland. Only then did we learn that many of the children we had sheltered were now orphans.  

Published in cooperation with the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust
Copyright © 2002 by the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust. Updated 2005.
North Carolina Department of Public Instruction
http://www.ncpublicschools.org/holocaust_council/