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<p>[QUOTE="DonnaML, post: 8333755, member: 110350"]Thanks for the photo and information, [USER=128351]@GinoLR[/USER]. If people will indulge one last story about Paris that has nothing to do with numismatics, the configuration of 18 Avenue de Versailles -- where my mother's first cousin Pierre lived until his death in 2008, so the apartment was in the family for more than 70 years -- was actually what allowed Uncle B. and his family to escape the Vel d'Hiv roundup, which I'm sure you must have read about. There was a decent movie about it, made in 2010, entitled "Sarah's Key" (French: Elle s'appelait Sarah).</p><p><br /></p><p>This is a translation of an account in French, written many years later by B.'s older son, my mother's first cousin Alex [later Alexandre], who was then 17 years old and later became an attorney in Paris:</p><p><br /></p><p>"Paris 1942. The telephone rang during the late afternoon of 15 July -- I remember that it was a work day. Papa picked up the receiver, and then after a few seconds he hung up without having spoken a word. He told us that he recognized the voice of Monsieur K., an official at police headquarters, whom Papa knew thanks to Uncle Gustav. [My grandmother’s brother Gustav, who did not survive.] Gustav had lived in Paris as a foreigner since 1933 and had formed an acquaintanceship [with the police official.] Without stating his name on the telephone, this official had said three words to my father: "Look out tonight!" Naturally, we understood that this man was warning us of imminent arrest.</p><p><br /></p><p>Despite the innate optimism of my father, Mama insisted that we leave our apartment. After a brief consultation we decided that <b>we would sleep all three in the small attic, which belonged to our rented apartment, and which is located on the 8th and last floor of the house at Avenue de Versailles No. 18. </b>In the meantime, I hurried to take the metro to rue Claude Bernard no. 62, near the Quartier Latin, where all the activities of the [Jewish] Scouts were located. From the metro station, I ran to tell everyone who was present that there was something serious for that night. I do not know how many people I could warn and save in this way.</p><p><br /></p><p>After my return, we put some blankets in the attic, so that we could sleep there on the floor, as the mansard [annex under a mansard roof] was only sparsely furnished. After supper we all went upstairs, we lay on the ground and tried to sleep, with as little noise as possible, so as not to attract the attention of the inhabitants of the adjoining mansards or the floor below. During the night we heard no alarming noise. That is why Papa went down to the concierge the next morning, July 16th. The latter told him that French policemen had come at four o'clock in the morning, and had rung and knocked at our apartment door for a long time. At one stroke it was clear: they had come to arrest us. And since you could not know if the police would return, we could not stay in our apartment again.</p><p><br /></p><p>So we spent another three days and three nights in the attic, which had neither water nor toilet, everything [had to be done?] on the staircase, and were left to the concierge or a neighbor of the neighboring mansards who could have denounced us, which luckily did not happen. This was the first of a long series of circumstances which miraculously saved us from the tragic fate of so many others.</p><p><br /></p><p>During the three days we spent in the attic, we were gradually informed by the concierge and some phone calls during the short times we were staying in our apartment that the police operation had been carried out under the name of " Rafle du Vel d'Hiv ", and about 10,000 Jews, all foreigners, were arrested by the French police on orders of the Germans. The arrested persons were first gathered in the old "Vélodrome d'Hiver", the winter velodrome, and then taken to the camp at Drancy, which was the starting point to a destination which was still unknown to us and whose existence the world learned much later: Auschwitz.</p><p><br /></p><p>Let us return to our situation on July 20, 1942. We could not stay much longer in the attic. This was too dangerous because of the danger of denunciation by one of the neighbors, and besides, because we could neither eat anything (neither water nor gas) nor we could stop four of us there longer. It was just as dangerous to go out to buy provisions, as well as a return to our apartment, where the police could return at any moment. So we had to seek help elsewhere, and it was not denied us: Papa and Mama were well known to a non-Jewish couple, the husband was simply a business friend of Papa. Pierre [then age 14] found protection in the family of a Jewish friend who had not yet risked anything since he was of French nationality. As for me, I was warmly welcomed in the family of one of my Scout friends, Eddy Florentin (Totem [Resistance name]: Flamant), rue du Faubourg Poissionière). This family, of Turkish[-Jewish] origin, enjoyed a certain protection of the Turkish government (which did not prevent Eddy from being arrested two years later, towards the end of the occupation, as a member of the Resistance, and deported in a train from which he escaped). [See <a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddy_Florentin;" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddy_Florentin;" rel="nofollow">https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddy_Florentin;</a> he was a famous Resistance leader and later a successful writer of books on World War II. He escaped with some friends from Convoy 79 to Auschwitz.]</p><p><br /></p><p>So we were hiding in three different places in Paris and could only communicate by telephone. We learned gradually of the catastrophic extent of the raid and the names of the arrested friends we should never see again. We were temporarily safe with the very courageous people who had taken us, but we were not allowed to leave the apartment or to let anyone see us: letters, gasmen, concierge, etc., for [we were] "Jews sought by the police." This was especially true for my parents, who were accommodated by people who were exclusively connected with non-Jews. For my part, as soon as someone rang the door of the Florentin family, I ran into my hiding place.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Early August 1942</p><p><br /></p><p>[After fleeing Paris in late July,] we rented two rooms in the same hotel in Lyon. But only a few days after our arrival, rumors circulated that foreign Jews were even arrested in the unoccupied zone by the Germans under the administration of the Vichy government. That is why Papa and Mama preferred to live in a small, uninhabited apartment, to which the D's [friends from [my family's village in the Black Forest]; Alex later married their daughter] had the keys: the apartment of Zina and Lothar L. (alias "Ferragut") who were trying to cross the Pyrenees to reach Spain. (They failed in the attempt, however, and had to return to Lyon a few days later.) In his usual optimism, Papa said "they will not do anything to the children" and let us sleep in the hotel (Pierre and me).</p><p><br /></p><p>In one of the following nights in August there was a knock on the door of our hotel room. French policemen wanted to see our papers. Since we had taken our real papers for foreigners with the stamp "JUIF", for Jew, Pierre and I were asked to get dressed and follow the policemen who took us to a commissariat where other people were already waiting. Afterwards, we were transported to the court of the small prison, which was located in the interior of the Justice Palace of Lyon, where many of the victims were already present and many more arrived. It was indeed, as we learned later, the great raid on foreign Jews of August [26-28] 1942 in the so-called "free" zone, which was modeled after the so-called "Vel d'Hiv", which took place a month earlier in Paris, and which we had escaped. The Vichy government obediently obeyed all the wishes of the Gestapo.</p><p><br /></p><p>We stayed without food and without an explanation until the late afternoon in this prison yard. At that moment, Pierre and a few other young people were simply dismissed, for, according to the orders that had been enacted, anyone who was younger than 16 years of age was to be freed. [Later on, this limit was not observed.] Pierre returned to the hotel and gave the D's and my parents the news about me. The next morning we were sent into police cars, and escorted by French gendarmes, to a place a few kilometers out of Lyon, whose name I had never heard of. We were then enclosed in a sort of large hangar or unused factory hall, closed on all sides, and also with French gendarmes and policemen in uniform or plainclothes, both on the outside as well as the inside. I think we must have been 200 to 300 people. We could sleep on camp beds and got something to eat.</p><p><br /></p><p>This situation, as far as I was concerned, lasted for three days, in which I mainly dealt with a plan of escape: I had noticed that one of the outside doors was clamped from the outside with an iron rod. I reckoned, with a broomstick I had found, to lift this iron rod through a crack in the door and open it in this way. It is more than likely that this attempt would have failed.</p><p><br /></p><p>Fortunately, I did not need to carry out this plan, because on the fourth or fifth day I was freed by extraordinary luck in a different way: from the second day of the internment, I was able to begin a conversation with one of the police inspectors who guarded us. After exchanging some banalities, I had the impression that this man gave me a certain sympathy - probably because I was one of the youngest prisoners (I was not yet 18 years old), and because I was one of the few who spoke French perfectly, without a foreign accent, which was not the case with the majority of the prisoners, who were almost all older than me. From the third day the Inspector told me he was going to do something for me, and it would be good if I had a confirmation that I had been living in France for several years before the war. In the certainty of trusting him, I gave him the address where he could meet Papa (which was unwise in the case that this man had played a double game and wanted to arrest my parents too.) That same evening he made contact to Papa, who found the solution to ask for a telegraphic confirmation from the hotel proprietor . . . .. As soon as he was in possession of this telegram, the Inspector informed me that I was to be freed the same evening, which happened. I left the place as quickly as I could and returned to Lyon. I think I was one of the few who were released from the camp. [The story I always heard from my mother is that Alex’s parents had to bribe the Inspector to get him to set Alex free.]</p><p><br /></p><p>Later, I learned that the other internees had been taken to Drancy soon, into the hands of the Germans, and they knew the fate that awaited them ... Many years later, when I was a lawyer, in the Justice Palace of Lyon. I found in a staircase a small window, through which one can see into the courtyard of the inner prison of Lyon. Every time I stopped, I saw this little courtyard where I had spent only a few hours as a prisoner destined for deportation and death-without knowing it.</p><p><br /></p><p>When he told me of my release from the detention center, the police inspector added in a low voice that it was madness to continue to live with my real papers as a Jew and a foreigner. At the same time, he gave me his private phone number, where he could be contacted. In the plain text, he offered to help me get a wrong ID card. In the days that followed, this Inspector, Monsieur F ....., gave passports, not only for me, but also for Papa, Mama and Pierre, and gave us false identity cards, [with birth places in Alsace (to explain the rather German accent of Papa) and French nationality. . . . He assured us that they were actually registered in the police department, so that they did not pose a threat in the case of a check.. . . Thanks to Monsieur F ... we were born in France from now on and had French nationality, and we could hope to be safe from arrest. . . ."</p><p><br /></p><p>The family spent the rest of the war living illegally with false papers, first in Dieulefit and then in Nice, and managed to survive the war. B. died at 96 in 1991, His wife L. at 83 in 1984. Pierre died at 71 in 2008, and Alex at 89 in 2013. Alex had two children, and many grandchildren and now great-grandchildren. None of them would have survived, if not for that one phone call from a sympathetic police official. And the assistance of friends who allowed the members of the family to hide with them. And much good fortune.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>
[QUOTE="DonnaML, post: 8333755, member: 110350"]Thanks for the photo and information, [USER=128351]@GinoLR[/USER]. If people will indulge one last story about Paris that has nothing to do with numismatics, the configuration of 18 Avenue de Versailles -- where my mother's first cousin Pierre lived until his death in 2008, so the apartment was in the family for more than 70 years -- was actually what allowed Uncle B. and his family to escape the Vel d'Hiv roundup, which I'm sure you must have read about. There was a decent movie about it, made in 2010, entitled "Sarah's Key" (French: Elle s'appelait Sarah). This is a translation of an account in French, written many years later by B.'s older son, my mother's first cousin Alex [later Alexandre], who was then 17 years old and later became an attorney in Paris: "Paris 1942. The telephone rang during the late afternoon of 15 July -- I remember that it was a work day. Papa picked up the receiver, and then after a few seconds he hung up without having spoken a word. He told us that he recognized the voice of Monsieur K., an official at police headquarters, whom Papa knew thanks to Uncle Gustav. [My grandmother’s brother Gustav, who did not survive.] Gustav had lived in Paris as a foreigner since 1933 and had formed an acquaintanceship [with the police official.] Without stating his name on the telephone, this official had said three words to my father: "Look out tonight!" Naturally, we understood that this man was warning us of imminent arrest. Despite the innate optimism of my father, Mama insisted that we leave our apartment. After a brief consultation we decided that [B]we would sleep all three in the small attic, which belonged to our rented apartment, and which is located on the 8th and last floor of the house at Avenue de Versailles No. 18. [/B]In the meantime, I hurried to take the metro to rue Claude Bernard no. 62, near the Quartier Latin, where all the activities of the [Jewish] Scouts were located. From the metro station, I ran to tell everyone who was present that there was something serious for that night. I do not know how many people I could warn and save in this way. After my return, we put some blankets in the attic, so that we could sleep there on the floor, as the mansard [annex under a mansard roof] was only sparsely furnished. After supper we all went upstairs, we lay on the ground and tried to sleep, with as little noise as possible, so as not to attract the attention of the inhabitants of the adjoining mansards or the floor below. During the night we heard no alarming noise. That is why Papa went down to the concierge the next morning, July 16th. The latter told him that French policemen had come at four o'clock in the morning, and had rung and knocked at our apartment door for a long time. At one stroke it was clear: they had come to arrest us. And since you could not know if the police would return, we could not stay in our apartment again. So we spent another three days and three nights in the attic, which had neither water nor toilet, everything [had to be done?] on the staircase, and were left to the concierge or a neighbor of the neighboring mansards who could have denounced us, which luckily did not happen. This was the first of a long series of circumstances which miraculously saved us from the tragic fate of so many others. During the three days we spent in the attic, we were gradually informed by the concierge and some phone calls during the short times we were staying in our apartment that the police operation had been carried out under the name of " Rafle du Vel d'Hiv ", and about 10,000 Jews, all foreigners, were arrested by the French police on orders of the Germans. The arrested persons were first gathered in the old "Vélodrome d'Hiver", the winter velodrome, and then taken to the camp at Drancy, which was the starting point to a destination which was still unknown to us and whose existence the world learned much later: Auschwitz. Let us return to our situation on July 20, 1942. We could not stay much longer in the attic. This was too dangerous because of the danger of denunciation by one of the neighbors, and besides, because we could neither eat anything (neither water nor gas) nor we could stop four of us there longer. It was just as dangerous to go out to buy provisions, as well as a return to our apartment, where the police could return at any moment. So we had to seek help elsewhere, and it was not denied us: Papa and Mama were well known to a non-Jewish couple, the husband was simply a business friend of Papa. Pierre [then age 14] found protection in the family of a Jewish friend who had not yet risked anything since he was of French nationality. As for me, I was warmly welcomed in the family of one of my Scout friends, Eddy Florentin (Totem [Resistance name]: Flamant), rue du Faubourg Poissionière). This family, of Turkish[-Jewish] origin, enjoyed a certain protection of the Turkish government (which did not prevent Eddy from being arrested two years later, towards the end of the occupation, as a member of the Resistance, and deported in a train from which he escaped). [See [URL]https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddy_Florentin;[/URL] he was a famous Resistance leader and later a successful writer of books on World War II. He escaped with some friends from Convoy 79 to Auschwitz.] So we were hiding in three different places in Paris and could only communicate by telephone. We learned gradually of the catastrophic extent of the raid and the names of the arrested friends we should never see again. We were temporarily safe with the very courageous people who had taken us, but we were not allowed to leave the apartment or to let anyone see us: letters, gasmen, concierge, etc., for [we were] "Jews sought by the police." This was especially true for my parents, who were accommodated by people who were exclusively connected with non-Jews. For my part, as soon as someone rang the door of the Florentin family, I ran into my hiding place. Early August 1942 [After fleeing Paris in late July,] we rented two rooms in the same hotel in Lyon. But only a few days after our arrival, rumors circulated that foreign Jews were even arrested in the unoccupied zone by the Germans under the administration of the Vichy government. That is why Papa and Mama preferred to live in a small, uninhabited apartment, to which the D's [friends from [my family's village in the Black Forest]; Alex later married their daughter] had the keys: the apartment of Zina and Lothar L. (alias "Ferragut") who were trying to cross the Pyrenees to reach Spain. (They failed in the attempt, however, and had to return to Lyon a few days later.) In his usual optimism, Papa said "they will not do anything to the children" and let us sleep in the hotel (Pierre and me). In one of the following nights in August there was a knock on the door of our hotel room. French policemen wanted to see our papers. Since we had taken our real papers for foreigners with the stamp "JUIF", for Jew, Pierre and I were asked to get dressed and follow the policemen who took us to a commissariat where other people were already waiting. Afterwards, we were transported to the court of the small prison, which was located in the interior of the Justice Palace of Lyon, where many of the victims were already present and many more arrived. It was indeed, as we learned later, the great raid on foreign Jews of August [26-28] 1942 in the so-called "free" zone, which was modeled after the so-called "Vel d'Hiv", which took place a month earlier in Paris, and which we had escaped. The Vichy government obediently obeyed all the wishes of the Gestapo. We stayed without food and without an explanation until the late afternoon in this prison yard. At that moment, Pierre and a few other young people were simply dismissed, for, according to the orders that had been enacted, anyone who was younger than 16 years of age was to be freed. [Later on, this limit was not observed.] Pierre returned to the hotel and gave the D's and my parents the news about me. The next morning we were sent into police cars, and escorted by French gendarmes, to a place a few kilometers out of Lyon, whose name I had never heard of. We were then enclosed in a sort of large hangar or unused factory hall, closed on all sides, and also with French gendarmes and policemen in uniform or plainclothes, both on the outside as well as the inside. I think we must have been 200 to 300 people. We could sleep on camp beds and got something to eat. This situation, as far as I was concerned, lasted for three days, in which I mainly dealt with a plan of escape: I had noticed that one of the outside doors was clamped from the outside with an iron rod. I reckoned, with a broomstick I had found, to lift this iron rod through a crack in the door and open it in this way. It is more than likely that this attempt would have failed. Fortunately, I did not need to carry out this plan, because on the fourth or fifth day I was freed by extraordinary luck in a different way: from the second day of the internment, I was able to begin a conversation with one of the police inspectors who guarded us. After exchanging some banalities, I had the impression that this man gave me a certain sympathy - probably because I was one of the youngest prisoners (I was not yet 18 years old), and because I was one of the few who spoke French perfectly, without a foreign accent, which was not the case with the majority of the prisoners, who were almost all older than me. From the third day the Inspector told me he was going to do something for me, and it would be good if I had a confirmation that I had been living in France for several years before the war. In the certainty of trusting him, I gave him the address where he could meet Papa (which was unwise in the case that this man had played a double game and wanted to arrest my parents too.) That same evening he made contact to Papa, who found the solution to ask for a telegraphic confirmation from the hotel proprietor . . . .. As soon as he was in possession of this telegram, the Inspector informed me that I was to be freed the same evening, which happened. I left the place as quickly as I could and returned to Lyon. I think I was one of the few who were released from the camp. [The story I always heard from my mother is that Alex’s parents had to bribe the Inspector to get him to set Alex free.] Later, I learned that the other internees had been taken to Drancy soon, into the hands of the Germans, and they knew the fate that awaited them ... Many years later, when I was a lawyer, in the Justice Palace of Lyon. I found in a staircase a small window, through which one can see into the courtyard of the inner prison of Lyon. Every time I stopped, I saw this little courtyard where I had spent only a few hours as a prisoner destined for deportation and death-without knowing it. When he told me of my release from the detention center, the police inspector added in a low voice that it was madness to continue to live with my real papers as a Jew and a foreigner. At the same time, he gave me his private phone number, where he could be contacted. In the plain text, he offered to help me get a wrong ID card. In the days that followed, this Inspector, Monsieur F ....., gave passports, not only for me, but also for Papa, Mama and Pierre, and gave us false identity cards, [with birth places in Alsace (to explain the rather German accent of Papa) and French nationality. . . . He assured us that they were actually registered in the police department, so that they did not pose a threat in the case of a check.. . . Thanks to Monsieur F ... we were born in France from now on and had French nationality, and we could hope to be safe from arrest. . . ." The family spent the rest of the war living illegally with false papers, first in Dieulefit and then in Nice, and managed to survive the war. B. died at 96 in 1991, His wife L. at 83 in 1984. Pierre died at 71 in 2008, and Alex at 89 in 2013. Alex had two children, and many grandchildren and now great-grandchildren. None of them would have survived, if not for that one phone call from a sympathetic police official. And the assistance of friends who allowed the members of the family to hide with them. And much good fortune.[/QUOTE]
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