Houdan
Houdan is a small town about 60 miles west of Paris and 20 miles north of Chartres. It’s a typical old village of the Ile-de-France region, with Normandy to its west. The towns history goes back 2000 years to Roman times. The St. Matthieu livestock fair held every year in Houdan recently celebrated its 950th anniversary.
The town’s distinguishing landmark is a tower built as a part of a fortification in 1125, hinting at Houdan’s role as a fortified border town. Its other important landmark is the church of St. Jacques and St. Christophe a fine example of 14th and 15th century architecture. The county seat of a rich agricultural area, this town is to this day a small but prosperous center of commerce.
In 1942 my brother and I were living with our mother in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, the scene of many roundup of Jews, notably the Vel d’Hiv one of July 16, 1942. I was three and my brother seven years old. Our mother sent us to Houdan because life was getting hard in Paris. She thought we would be safer in the countryside. The placement was made by theFrench Red Cross because we were children of a prisoner of war.
My father had joined the French army (the Foreign Legion) in 1939, in part to get citizenship papers that the government had promised to all foreign nationals who would enlist. He had come from Poland when he was twelve by himself and without papers. He fought for a time on the Meuse and was given a field commission as lieutenant. After the German army captured Paris and France signed an armistice in 1940, He was made a prisoner of war and was sent to a prisoner of war camp in Germany. He was eventually transferred to Stalag XVIII-C in Salzburg, Austria, where he remained until 1945.
At the beginning of the war in 1940, my mother decided to return to Paris after first escaping Paris with us to Vichy France in the south. She was concerned about her parents who had remained in Paris. Also, she wasn’t getting news of my father while she was in Vichy France and she needed a job. After my brother and I were taken to Houdan, our mother lived with her parents at their house in Fontenay-sous-Bois on the edge of Paris where she found protection because her father was a friend of the local police prefect. Despite her being a professional violinist, she worked in Paris as a seamstress making German uniforms.
My mother witnessed the deportations. Her father died when sent home from the hospital because he was Jewish, even though he was suffering from acute appendicitis. When she came to Houdan to visit us, my mother risked her life because she was not allowed to leave her neighborhood. One day she walked up to the Gestapo building in Paris because she had not gotten news of my father for a long time. Seeing her star, the guard at the door yelled at her to go away. He said that if she came back she would never leave.
The Vel d’Hiv Roundup
My cousin Maurice Herzhorn, who was also three in 1942, remained in Paris with his parents Albert and Helene. While they went to work in their small shop producing coats, they would leave him with a relative in her apartment. In July of 1942, The French police carried out a major roundup of Jews in the Paris region (la Grande Rafle) code-named “vent printanier” (spring wind). The police came to arrest Maurice’s sitter. He was with her at the time, and they took him too. His parents were at work and not arrested.
In the Grande Rafle, the big raid of July 16 and 17, 1942, the French police rounded up 12,884 Jews – 3,031 men, 5,802 women, and 4,051 children under the age of sixteen. They were kept for several days with minimal care in the indoor sports arena, the Velodrome d’Hiver (le Vel d’Hiv). The raid became known as “la rafle du Vel d’Hiv”, the Vel d’Hiv roundup. Single men and Women, and families without children, were separated and sent as soon as possible to Auschwitz. Families with children were shipped to French concentration camps at Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Roland in central France, to await deportation.
Because of their concern for French public opinion the Nazi did not want to deport the children. The French authorities opposed just sending the parents since they would be left with thousands of parentless children to take care of. Also, fearing that they could not fill the quotas set by the Gestapo unless the children were counted and deported, those same officials pleaded with the Nazis to take the children. They got no immediate answer because authorization had to come from headquarters in Berlin.
To facilitate deportation of the adults while waiting for their answer from Eichman in Berlin, the French police forcibly separated the children from their parents and sent all 4051 from the Vel d’Hiv to the Drancy concentration camp by bus on August 15 and 16, 1942. My cousin Maurice was probably among them.
Drancy
The Drancy concentration camp was a large unfinished apartment complex in the town of Drancy, a northern suburb of Paris. It was chosen as a camp because of its proximity to a major railroad freight yard with lines to the East. 70,000 of the 80,000 jews deported to Germany and Poland from France were housed there before their departure. Max Jacob, the poet, a friend of Picasso, died in Drancy on May 5, 1944.
Eyewitnesses described the horrible conditions endured by the children from the Vel d’Hiv when they arrived in Drancy. Children ranging in age from 2 to 15 were left with little food and practically no adult supervision. They were housed hundred to a bare unfurnished room with only straw to sleep on. Many suffered from dysentery and kept soileing their clothes. It was not uncommon for them to cry through the night or become sick and disoriented.
The word finally came that the Nazis were willing to take the children for deportation, but because they were concerned that freight cars full of children would roll through the countryside, they wanted to make it look like families were being expelled. They suggested having the children dispersed among stranger adult deportees over several convoys. The French authorities agreed, and the deportation of the Vel d’Hiv children began on August 17, 1942 with train convoy #20 From Drancy-Le Bourget rail depot.
This convoy was followed by others leaving about one a day until the end of August. Even with the dispersal of children among adults, nearly half of the one thousand deportees on those trains were children. If my cousin Maurice had survived Drancy, he would have been on one of those convoys. After days of traveling in closed freight cars with little food and water in the August heat, many died on the train. All the children who arrived alive at Auschwitz, except for some who were picked for human experiments, were gassed soon after arriving. None of the 4,051 children of the Vel d’Hiv raid survived the war.
Recently I looked through published lists of French deportees gathered from convoy rosters compiled by Serge Klarsfeld, to see if I could find my cousin’s name. It was unlikely that I would, since at the age of three he may not have known his last name and thus was probably listed without a name. I searched in vain.
Houdan
In Houdan, my brother and I lived in a large house owned by a doctor who had gone to Morocco at the beginning of the war. He left the property in the charge of caretakers, M. and Mme Trouve and their grown daughter Andree, who had lived in a small house on the premises. To earn extra money and rations, they began taking in children placed there by the Red Cross because they were children of prisoners of war. The Trouves were aware that some of these children were Jewish, and duly registered them at the Mairie as was the law in occupied France.
The German army controlled Houdan until the Americans liberated it. At one time after the Normandy landings, some units of the German army were billeted in our house. The whole town knew that my brother and I, as well as other children, were Jewish. Free to come and go, we all went to school and participated in its activities. The town priest, Abbe Pierre Conde, threatened to excommunicate anyone who would denounce any of the Jews. No one in town ever did so. We were asked to go to church for appearance sake and participated in church youth activities, but never encouraged to accept the religion.
Houdan had a strong resistance organization. Several members were arrested and sent to die in concentration camps. The Trouves placed their lives on the line when they hid my cousins Henri and Rosette, who were 19 and 16 respectively and defied the law by being in Houdan, since as Jews, they had to stay in their Paris neighborhoods.
The Liberation
On August 18, 1944, Houdan was liberated by the American Third Army under General Patton. Members of the 5th Armored Division, along with the 79th Infantry Division and the 7th Armored Division, entered Houdan chasing the fleeing German army. The next day General Patton arrived in Houdan and spoke briefly to members of the F.F.I.(the Resistance) as well as the townspeople. He was on his way to a decisive battle across the river Seine at Mantes a few miles north. On August 25th, 1944, Paris was liberated. For my brother and me the war was over.
All that remained was for our father to come home. He was freed and repatriated a year later in June 1945. My brother and I were still living in Houdan. One day I saw a truck stop in front of our house, and my mother came out accompanied by a strange man. It was my father, whom I never remembered seeing. I was less than a year old when he left for the service. Our immediate family was reunited.
Helen and Albert Herzhorn also survived the war, but they never heard anything about the fate of their son Maurice. After the war, they continued living in Paris, working in their shop. They helped their niece an nephew, Rosette and Henri Herzhorn who had survived the war with us in Houdan, to start a new life. They never had another child.