-Good afternoon, everyone.
I'm Shelbie Johnson, the distance learning specialist
here at the National World War II Museum,
and thank you so much for joining us on our Webinar today
with Marthe Cohn.
But before we get started,
I do want to go over some housekeeping items.
First things first --
this is just a quick review of the GoToWebinar technology.
So somewhere on your screen, you will see a question mark.
If you have a question at any point during this Webinar,
you can type it into that box.
And I have Chrissy here behind the scenes.
She'll respond to your questions.
If you have any tech issues,
you can type those into that box, as well.
But I always recommend, to prevent tech issues,
make sure that you have all windows closed
besides GoToWebinar,
and should anything happen,
I always recommend exiting out of the program,
restarting your computer, and trying to log back in.
That usually solves that problem.
The one handout we have attached here,
that's going to be the teacher guide
that I e-mailed out to everyone earlier this week,
but it includes some curriculum pieces,
some post-visit activities for your students.
And if you have not already purchased Marthe's book,
"Behind Enemy Lines," I highly recommend it.
I've been reading it. It's a great book.
And we are offering a 20% discount
in the museum's web store.
That link is included in the teacher guide,
so you can click it directly.
It will bring you right to the cart.
And that 20% discount,
you're going to use the code "Webinar"
when you're checking out.
Now, obviously today's presentation is --
We're actually remembering
International Holocaust Remembrance Day,
which is not today, that's tomorrow,
so we're a day early,
but we are going to be focusing on "Behind Enemy Lines"
with Marthe Cohn.
And thank you so much for joining us today, Marthe.
We appreciate you being here.
And the first thing I want to do
is show your video that you've brought with you,
so if you would like to introduce that
to our students who are watching.
-Yes. I would like, first,
to thank the staff of the World War II Museum
who invited me.
I cannot give names because there are too many people,
but it's the staff.
Okay.
And I hope that you enjoy my presentations.
First, we are going to present a video, a DVD.
In 2004, Mr. Richard Trank, the movie director
of the Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles,
where we live, came to my home
and interviewed me for five hours.
But, really, the video,
the DVD will last less than 10 minutes.
And now we will --
Oh, the DVD was made specially
by somebody else in the Wiesenthal Center
for my presentation in a hotel in Beverly Hills in 2004.
Here's my DVD.
-How does a young girl from a devoutly Orthodox Jewish family
end up becoming a spy whose efforts helped
to bring an earlier end to the war in Europe in 1945?
The answer to that question was one that Marthe Cohn,
born Marthe Hoffnung, kept to herself
for the better part of a half-century.
Born in 1920 in the French town of Metz
in the Alsace region of France near the German border,
Marthe was one of seven children.
The family was quite religious but at the same time
mixed easily with their non-Jewish neighbors.
But with war clouds on the horizon in September of 1939,
the Hoffnungs and many of their Jewish neighbors
decided to move to a safer part of France,
away from the German border,
to the town of Poitiers, southwest of Paris.
However, they were not safe for long.
[ Gunfire, explosions ]
The Nazis invaded France, and with little resistance,
the French government capitulated.
Immediately, life began to change.
-We didn't know how bad it would be.
We could not understand that,
because even if you knew about Kristallnacht,
it was in Germany.
They did that to the Germans.
They couldn't do that to the French people.
-For a while, in spite
of the various restrictions placed on the Jews,
the Hoffnungs were able to go about their daily business.
Marthe started nursing school
and became engaged to a young medical student.
As the war progressed and resistance to the Nazis
and their Vichy French collaborators
became more widespread,
the family began to take more chances.
Marthe and her sisters hid Jews
who did not have the proper papers,
and her fiancé became actively involved
in resistance activities.
One day, French police arrested her sister Stephanie
and then her father.
When her father was released shortly thereafter,
the family managed to escape using false papers
that did not identify them as Jews.
There was a plan to help Stephanie
escape from the French jail she was being held at,
but sadly, it failed.
-She was caught into camp, and then later,
she was transferred to Drancy, near Paris,
and then to Pithiviers,
and she heard that they were going to be
deported that afternoon,
the afternoon of Yom Kippur '42.
-Most of the Hoffnung family went to the mountains
to join an older brother who was head of the resistance there.
Marthe finished her nursing studies in Marseille,
occasionally getting the chance to rendezvous with her fiancé,
Jacques.
Then in the summer of 1943,
she went to Paris to work for a month in a hospital,
traveling again under her false papers.
She met briefly with Jacques.
He was on the run for a resistance act
that led to the murder of a Nazi collaborator.
She begged him to stay in hiding with her.
-And I told him, "You cannot go back to Préty.
You have immediately to escape and go south and go to Spain,
and I will join you."
But he said he has to go back.
His family is in Préty. His brother is there.
He will tell them goodbye and leave with his brother
and his friends as soon as they can,
and he left --
After his examination, he left,
and he promised me to write me every day,
and three letters arrived, and the fourth one never came.
-She soon learned that Jacques had been arrested
along with his brother and several friends.
He was tried and then executed for his resistance activities.
Brokenhearted, Marthe returned to Marseille,
graduated from her nursing studies,
and then moved back to Paris to work for a registry.
She remained there until the Allies liberated France.
-When we heard on the radio
that the troops were entering Paris,
all the church bells started ringing,
and we opened our windows,
and we all sang "La Marseillaise."
The whole city was singing "La Marseillaise."
-Almost immediately after the liberation,
Marthe enlisted in the French Army,
where, initially, she worked as a social worker
in the Alsace region of the country,
close to her hometown of Metz.
When her commanding officer learned
that Marthe spoke fluent German,
he recruited her to join Army intelligence.
-I was introduced to Colonel Bouvet.
He told me he needs me to interrogate people,
to know what's going on, to know how the strategy of the German,
if they are retreating or not retreating
and how many people are there.
You know, all this military information.
-After procuring information from Nazi POWs,
Marthe was ready for her spy mission.
It involved crossing the border from Switzerland into Germany
to see how entrenched the Nazis still were.
She would then have to pass that intelligence on to the Allies.
It took more than 13 tries,
but Marthe made it over the border into Germany.
Her cover was that she was a German nurse
trying to find out what happened to her Nazi fiancé.
One day, she came upon a group of German soldiers
who had retreated from the Allies.
-And we were walking, and among us
was an uncommissioned officer
who was an SS,
and he was raving about the Jews,
how much he had killed Poles and Jews and all that,
and he loved -- And he smelled Jews a mile away.
You know, that's always what they'd say.
He was going back to the Siegfried Line.
He had been wounded, and he came back from the hospital,
and as we walked, he fainted.
So I was a good German nurse.
I took care of him.
-From this SS soldier,
Marthe was able to obtain important information
about exactly what was going on at the Nazi front lines.
Making her way back to the Swiss border,
she was able to transmit her report
with the help of a Swiss farming family.
Marthe then crossed the border again
and made her way back into Germany
to see if there was anything else she could uncover.
-I walked to the Siegfried Line to see what's going on,
and when I arrived at the Siegfried Line,
they were all gone.
The last stragglers were leaving,
and they told me that the Siegfried Line is empty.
Do you realize what an important information that was?
-The information Marthe uncovered helped
to shorten the Allied effort to defeat the Nazis
and saved untold numbers of lives.
For the better part of a half-century,
Marthe did not talk of her experiences,
even with her family.
But in the mid-1990s, while visiting in France,
she made a request for her French Army records.
When officials at the French Archive
saw her file of commendations and achievements,
the wheels were put into motion
for her to be awarded the Médaille Militaire,
one of France's highest military honors,
and the same medal awarded to Sir Winston Churchill
by the French government.
Why was she so quiet about her exploits over the years?
-It was not modesty,
but I thought that nobody would believe me.
You know, usually, a spy is a very tall, good-looking woman,
and I didn't feel I was that type of a person at all.
I was a very unlikely spy.
-...to Marthe, who can tell us more about her story,
and when she's finished, we'll go to our Q&A session.
So take it away, Marthe. -Okay.
I am sorry that I have so little time to tell you about my story,
so I will be as brief as I can.
After the liberation of Paris,
I wanted to join the French Army.
It was very difficult
because many, many people wanted to join the Army,
and I was not accepted because I had not the right documents.
But several months later, in November --
because Paris was liberated in August 1945 --
but in November 1945, the mother of my fiancé,
you saw in the DVD,
was executed by the Germans along with his brother.
My fiancé was a medical student,
and his brother was a law student,
and then they were both executed with two other friends
on October 6, 1945.
So as soon the train was again functioning
between Paris and Préty,
I went to see their mother,
and I took her to Paris because she was very ill.
Her two only sons had been executed, like I told you,
and her husband was a resident
in the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany.
So she met the Army at the cemetery
where her two boys were buried by the Germans,
and I was with her, and the Army asked her --
I am talking about the mother of my fiancé --
and the Army asked her if she needed any help.
And she told them, "Miss Hoffnung" --
that's my maiden name --
"would like to join the Army
but doesn't have the documents she needs.
Can you help her?"
In a few days, everything was done,
and I was now assigned to the 151 Regiment of Infantry
of the First French Army, and I left --
The regiment, like the front,
in November 1945
was in Alsace.
So I left Paris in a bus for Alsace, and when I arrived,
the captain of intelligence
who debriefed me
decided that I was going to be a social worker
and not a nurse.
So for several weeks, I visited our troops at the front
and brought them what they needed --
mostly underwear, socks,
hats, scarves, blankets,
food, and reading and writing material.
And then one day, crossing the square of the village,
I met the colonel of the regiment.
He had, in 1943,
killed the first German
in the metro station Barbès-Rochechouart in Paris.
So that colonel stopped me in the square of the village
and asked me to answer his phone during his lunch break,
and he showed me around, and leaving, he told me,
"I am sorry I have nothing to read for you but German books."
And I answered that I read German fluently,
so very interested, he walked back towards me
and asked me if I spoke German,
and I told him, yes, as well as French.
Then he explained to me that, in the German Army,
all males from the age of 12 to old age
were in the Army in uniform.
So any man in civilian clothes
walking the streets of Germany would be noticed and arrested.
That's why they needed a woman.
And he asked me if I accepted to be transferred
to the intelligence service of the First Army,
and I accepted.
And he left, and I sat on the chair
and wondered what predicament I'd put myself.
Too late.
Two days later, I was picked up by intelligence officers
of the First French Army
and taken to Blois,
another city in Alsace,
where I underwent an extremely intensive training
for what I was going to do.
After the training was terminated,
they asked me to devise my own alibi
so that --
Because if I devised it,
it would stick much better than an alibi given to me.
So I devised an alibi, presented it, and it was accepted.
After that, I was assigned
to the Commanders of Africa regiment
of the First French Army,
and Colonel Bouvet -- you heard his name in the DVD --
was commanding that regiment.
And Colonel Bouvet asked me first to interrogate prison --
German prisoners of war to learn what was the plan of attack --
the plan of retreat of the German Army
from Alsace to Germany.
We were now in January 1945.
The Germans had counterattacked in Belgium, had lost.
Now they were counterattacking in Alsace,
coming from Strasbourg, and all our Allied armies,
the French Army included,
had to retreat west quite a bit for several weeks
until we stopped the counterattack.
So I interrogated generals and colonels
and obtained important information.
I can boast about it because in one of my medals,
the Croix de Guerre, was two citation.
In one citation, it was noted --
It is noted that I provided Colonel Bouvet
with extremely important information
about the retreat of German from Alsace to Germany.
After that, Colonel Bouvet asked me to cross the front in Alsace,
and 13 times, I tried to cross the front in Alsace,
and I was not successful.
And one...
Crossing the front was very difficult for many reasons.
First, we had very little information,
and the information we got was not always accurate.
So if I needed to go to a certain place
and find something,
I went there and couldn't find anything,
so I could not proceed.
Another reason -- the military guides who knew exactly the --
how to proceed on the ground
explained to me how to go from A to B
and what would be found on the ground,
but they are humans, and they make mistakes.
For example, one night, I was taken to a big field
in February 1945,
and by --
We were in a Jeep.
We stopped.
We got out of the Jeep, and I was told to cross the field
to go to a small town northwest of the field
where I would find a small group of German military
who were going to retreat somewhere still in Alsace,
not yet in Germany.
So I crossed the field, and suddenly, I heard a big crack,
and I was submerged in an ice-cold canal.
I could not call for help.
I had to do it by my own.
So I finally, after long time,
found the place which was not as frozen,
where I could grasp sufficiently the side of the canal
to get out of it.
And I never even caught a cold.
But I never found the town,
and at daybreak, I noticed that my --
the prints of my boots
showed that I had walked in circles,
so that was an experiment.
After that, the captain
who directed our small intelligence group
decided that I was going to go
into Germany through Switzerland.
Swiss was a neutral country, but they had helped the Germans
as long as the Germans were successful.
Now we were successful. They helped us.
So I was taken to Basel, where I met again Colonel Reinhart,
who commanded the intelligence service
of the Swiss customs in Basel,
and Colonel Reinhart accepted
that I cross from Switzerland into Germany.
And he called an agent, Mr. LeMer,
who took me by car to Schaffhausen,
which was very close to the German town of Singen,
where I was supposed to go,
and we went by car to Schaffhausen,
and Mr. LeMer stopped the car
and showed me --
We crossed a small forest, and on the other side,
he showed me a huge field bordered on the northern edge
by a German road, country road.
There was no barrier on that field
going from the field until the road.
The forest and the field was Switzerland
but the road was Germany,
and because there was no barrier,
the road was controlled by two military --
German military sentinels heavily armed
who walked from the eastern edge of the width of the field
to the center and stopped.
The other sentinel came from the west, met him.
They talked two seconds and turned their back
and walked to the edge of the field.
And they were doing that constantly,
without stopping, night and day.
So Mr. LeMer and I, we stayed all afternoon in the forest,
and towards the evening,
he told me it was the time to go.
And he had told me before, he said before nightfall,
I would have to crawl along the field,
hide behind the bushes when both sentinels had met and separated
and turned their back to me,
walking to the edges of the field,
and when they came back and separated again,
turning their back to me, I had to go up the road,
walk towards the east, towards the right, towards Singen.
So we stayed in the forest all afternoon
until it was evening.
Mr. LeMer told me, "Now is the time."
I took my little suitcase.
I had no compass, no map, no radio, no...
I had nothing written.
Everything I needed to know was in my memory,
but I had vouchers for everything I needed in Germany,
like hotels, restaurants, trains,
buses, food, whatever I needed.
And I had a lot of money in my suitcase.
So when Mr. LeMer told me it was time to go,
I took my little suitcase,
where there were only a change of clothes,
of which I had taken all the labels off
so that nobody knows that they came from France,
and I crawled along the field and hid behind the bushes
until everything was perfect.
But once behind the bushes, I became so terrified
that I was paralyzed by fear,
and it took me a very, very long time to overcome that fear.
And suddenly, something clicked in my brain.
I remembered something, and that made me get up,
take my little suitcase, and walk on the road,
meet the soldier who came back towards me
from the eastern edge of the field.
I raised my right arm, "Heil Hitler,"
and he asked to see my identity card.
I was now called Marthe Ulrich.
Like I told you, I had an entire alibi, and he looked at my card,
and I wondered if he would recognize
that the card was a forged card,
but he gave it back to me without questioning.
I was now in Germany. How much?
-You have about 12 minutes left.
-Oh, okay.
Then in Germany,
I had no idea what was going on
because I was sent to Germany for two purposes --
for military information, of course,
but also information how the civilians
were reacting to the war...
which was extremely important for all the Allied armies
to know before they invaded Germany.
So in Freyburg...
My sector was from the Swiss border to Freyburg.
In Freyburg, I was checking...
watching what the Germans were doing to do the same things,
and I noticed that in daytime,
there was no transportation whatsoever.
The trains, the military cars, the buses,
nothing functioned in daytime.
They functioned only at night
because of the Allied bombardments.
But in daytime, when the Germans wanted to walk
from A to B, they had to walk,
and they always walked in groups.
And I joined a group, like you saw in the DVD,
with an SS,
and he was immediately --
He told us that he came back from the Russian front,
where he had been wounded,
and he had left just the hospital and came back
because he was now assigned to the Siegfried Line.
And during the whole time we walked,
he was telling all the atrocities
that the SS and the...
had committed on the Eastern Front,
which was a thousand times worse
than what they committed on the Western Front.
So as we walked, and he was talking constantly,
he suddenly fainted, so I took care of him.
And when he regained consciousness,
he was so thankful that I took care of him
that he invited me to come to the Siegfried Line
and to visit him, and he gave me his phone number.
For three weeks, I didn't go back.
I had other things to do.
But three weeks later, I came back to Freyburg,
and I heard on the German radio,
said Allied armies were very close
and were going to invade Freyburg.
So I went back to the Siegfried Line
to visit my friend in the SS,
and when I arrived, I discovered
that the Siegfried Line was completely evacuated.
The last cart loads were leaving.
So I questioned several stragglers
who walked independently
to make sure that I had the right information,
and when they all confirm that the Siegfried Line
was completely evacuated in that region,
I walked back to Freyburg as fast as I could,
and the city was completely deserted.
All the Germans said that the Allied armies
were going to invade.
They were locked in their homes.
I was all alone in the center of Freyburg,
and I waited in the main artery,
and suddenly, a tank arrived and rolled towards me.
How was I going to tell the members of the tank
that that I was a friend and not an enemy?
I had absolutely no paper proving who I was.
So I went in the middle of the street
and raised my right arm, which I cannot do,
and as high as I could, and I made the victory sign,
the V sign of Winston Churchill.
And the tank, because I was extremely lucky,
did not kill me, but stopped.
I asked that the officer in charge come down
and talks to me, and he came,
and I asked him to take me immediately to headquarters
because I had important information, and he did.
I was quite assertive, I must say.
And I arrived at the headquarters.
I met Commander Petit...
who was very suspicious and told me,
"You tell me the truth."
And I told him.
I wrote on the piece of paper the phone number,
because we had the same technology
in the French Army as American Army.
We could call any service on the field.
He called my service.
The way I showed him that he could trust me.
And they were happy to know that I was still alive.
I had no way to remember,
so I could not communicate often with them.
So after that, Commander Petit sent a patrol
to the Siegfried Line,
which came back eight hours later and said,
"It's true. The Siegfried Line is completely evacuated."
I now was a very important VIP
at the French headquarters
because it was the French Army I met.
It was the French Army which invaded Freyburg,
and you can all Google it and see that I tell you the truth.
And Commander Petit invited me for dinner.
I was given a room, and the next morning,
he asked me if I want to go back to my service,
and I told him, "No. I do not want to go back.
My mission terminates the day of the armistice.
I have to call the front today again."
And I ask him for very important thing.
I asked him for a bicycle because I was tired of walking,
so he gave me a bicycle, and I left.
And so that's very important information I got.
I cannot tell you the details.
You have to read my book.
So next information I got
was where the exact location
where the remnant of the German Army
was hidden in ambush, waiting for the Allied armies,
and that's why I got all my medals.
Thank you very much.
-And since you -- That's the perfect segue.
Since you talked about your medals,
let's share with the students some of your medals.
So here, this medal -- -No. No, no.
-Oh, you want to start with this one?
Okay. All right.
So I'm going to put this one up closer so they can see it.
And can you let everyone know what this one is?
-That's a Legion d'honneur,
the highest medal you can get in France.
-And which one would you like to show next?
All right.
-That's a Médaille Militaire that Winston Churchill got, too.
And that's like the Congressional Medal in America.
-This one.
-You have no time to show all of them?
-Yes. We can show them all of them.
Then show this one. -Okay.
-That's a Reconnaissance of the Nation from France.
That's a Croix de Guerre, and I told you one of the citations
was that I provided Colonel Bouvet
with very important information on the retreat of the Germans
from Alsace to Germany.
That's a medal to show that I was three years in Vietnam
after the war in Europe as a nurse for the French Army.
-This one here?
-And that one was given to me in 2014
by the German government
to thank me for having helped save many lives in Germany, too,
because my information was provided so much
that the war was shortened.
Thank you.
-And did you want to show this one? -No.
-Okay. And thank you for sharing a little bit of your story
with the students.
It's amazing.
And again, if you have not read the book yet,
I highly recommend it.
It's a very amazing book with so many amazing stories
that includes your entire family, all amazing people
that did wonderful things during the war.
But we have a lot of questions from the students,
so let's get started with those.
A question I received quite a bit from students is,
"Do you see yourself as a Holocaust survivor?"
-I don't know because I was never arrested.
I, several times in Germany, was very close,
but I was never arrested.
Am I a survivor? Sure.
I lived for five years
under the occupation of the German Army,
and that's --
I deserve the title of...
Okay. -All right.
Another question that we've gotten quite a bit --
"Were there ever any times where you felt like
you were going to get caught
or it was going to be discovered that you were a spy?"
-Yeah, many times.
And do you want an example?
-Yes, please.
-Okay.
One day in Freyburg, I wanted to go back to the Swiss border
because I had family in the Swiss border
where I needed to go,
and I hitchhiked
because I saw other Germans hitchhiking with an army truck.
And I asked the driver
if he was going towards the south of Germany,
towards the Swiss border, and he told me, "Yes."
So I went on the bus, which was an open bus.
We drove all night.
It was extremely cold.
It was in April 1945.
And I was with several Germans.
We all lied next to each other to keep warm.
We had no blanket, and it was an open truck.
So at daybreak, the driver stopped in the countryside
where there was nothing and told us that we had to get out.
And we found out that we were not in the south of Germany.
We were east of Freyburg.
He took us where he was going.
He felt if we were hitchhiking,
then we would go where he wants us to go.
So we all got out of the truck, and it was a little sunshine.
I laid down on the grass, and I fell asleep,
and suddenly, somebody shook my shoulder
and told me to awake
because there were bombardiers,
of the American Army flying above us,
and anytime they saw small groups,
they would throw bombs on them,
so they wanted me to awake and open my eyes.
I said, "Why? What is going on?"
but I said it in French, not in English.
So they became extremely hostile and came walking towards me.
I took my little suitcase, and I said to them,
"I do not know about you,
but my brother is going to explode,
and I ran up a little hill because, before lying down,
I always check where I was to find an escape if I needed it,
and I'd seen that little hill behind us,
and there was very tall grass on top of the hill.
So I run up there, and from there,
I saw on another road very far away
a cart coming pulled by a horse.
It was a milkman.
So I run towards him, and I ask him,
"Could you take me to the next town?"
And he said, "Yeah."
And that's how I was saved.
-Wow. That's amazing. Thank you so much for sharing.
-I had many, many other problems like that.
I was always watching for
and ready in case I was tried to be arrested.
-So that answers another question
that we've gotten quite a few times.
A lot of students wanted to know, were you ever scared
while you were doing this work?
-Yes. Sometimes I was scared, but never like the once
when I was lying behind some bushes
waiting to cross into Germany.
If I was scared, I was scared for guns,
and then I became extremely quiet
and ready for what was going to happen.
And I think very fast,
so I always found the right answers to the questions,
and that's why I was saved so many times.
-And that leads me to another question from Terry B.
Terry B. wants to know why you were unsuccessful
getting into Germany
the first 13 times you tried.
-I tried to explain to you, there were many reasons.
One of them was that our --
During the war, everything changes very fast,
and everything is very fluid,
and I was told that I would find certain things
and couldn't find them, so I couldn't proceed.
Another reason is the military guides, like I told you,
and that happened twice.
And the first time I was arrested
by some American soldiers in our army.
And because I was on the wrong pathway
on the mountain,
and they had only received orders to protect a ghost,
they never were told if it was a man, a woman, or a child.
And they arrested me because the military guy
put me on the wrong pathway.
On the second instead of the third, so that's why.
So there were many, many reasons like that because...
But you have to read my book.
I have no time to go into so many details.
Okay.
-Now, we're going to go back
to the beginning of your story
because a lot of the students are interested
about your childhood and growing up in France.
And Marley wants to know if you were ever treated poorly
when you were growing up because you were Jewish.
-There were two I remember,
only two episodes when I was growing up.
When I was 5 years old,
we were leaving the synagogue of Metz,
which was in a very bad neighborhood at that time.
Now it's changed.
It's a very good neighborhood now,
but at that time, it was a very bad neighborhood,
and when we left the synagogue, my father,
my two brothers, and I...
Young boys --
they were really very bad kids --
started to call us dirty Jews,
and they threw pebbles at us,
and one pebble hit me on the chin.
And I looked at my father.
I was 5 years old, and I couldn't understand
why we were treated differently
because we were Jewish.
That was beyond my comprehension.
So my father became -- understood my looking at him,
and he took off his belt and ran after these kids,
and I've never loved him as much as that day.
And my two brothers took my hand and took me home.
So the second episode happened when I was about 10 years old
in our neighborhood.
My mother sent me to buy a dozen eggs
in the little shop very close to the house,
and when I walked back with my eggs in a little bag,
I met a young girl about my age from the neighborhood.
I knew her by sight, but I didn't know her otherwise.
And she started to call me dirty Jew, and I told her,
"It's true. I'm Jewish, but I'm not dirty."
And she kept saying, "Dirty Jew, dirty Jew, dirty Jew,"
so I got enough, and I took my dozen eggs,
and I broke them on her head.
And she was covered in yellow and white eggs.
And I ran home, and I told my mother what happened,
and she told me that I was right,
never to accept to be insulted.
-That's a great story. Thank you for sharing that.
And that leads me to our next question.
A lot of students are interested to know
what it was like living in Nazi-occupied France,
with all of the restrictions
that they placed on Jewish citizens.
- We -- You know, as soon as the Germans invaded France,
they made all the fathers of Jewish families
come to the city hall,
to French city hall,
and register all members of the family.
That way, the Germans had the perfect list
of all the Jews in occupied France.
And we were refugees in Poitiers,
like you saw in the DVD,
and Poitiers was in occupied France.
So very soon,
we got identity cards with the stamp "Jew" on it.
With the stamp "Jew," we had no right to go to any public space.
Not the train station, not the post office,
not any public garden or the river,
to swim in the river of the town.
We had no right to be anywhere public.
Not in the cinema, not in the store.
We had no right to go in a food store
until 4:30 in the afternoon,
when the Germans thought that everything would have been sold.
But all the owners of the store --
At that time, there were no supermarkets.
There were only mom-and-pop shops.
And the owners all told us, "Do not worry.
We know what you are used to buying.
We will put it aside, and you come at 4:30."
And as long as we lived in Poitiers,
we were never deprived of anything.
And all the town was punished if caught by this for the person
and for every member of their family.
And that gives me the opportunity
to tell you that, in France,
75% of Jews survived
because so many French people who were not Jewish
risked their lives and of all members of their family
to save us,
and I'm very happy that I can tell you that.
-And that brings up something from the book.
In your book, you talk about how your family
helped a lot of people,
and Spencer and Hannah B,
they're interested to know what made you want to help people,
and was there ever a point where you got scared
and you wanted to stop?
-We were.
It was absolutely normal to help other people.
And we had in our family a little boy
who lived with us since 1938.
My oldest brother and my older sister had taken him out,
and his little brother was -- Jacques was 3 years old,
and his little brother, Georgie, was only 2 years old
when they came to our house.
My brother and sister went into Germany
the day after Kristallnacht in November 1938
and got them out of Germany.
And Jacques lived during the whole occupation with us.
His brother was raised by one of our aunts,
and both children survived the war.
Jacques is now in Israel,
and he's professionally
an electrical engineer
in a university,
and he's extremely successful professionally,
and he's married and has three children
and eight grandchildren.
So you see, it was worth saving him.
His brother survived the war at my aunt's house,
but he died as a soldier in Israel in the Seven Day War.
-Thank you.
-And my sister Stephanie and I,
we saved hundreds of people who rang our bell.
We did not know where they came from.
We didn't know who they were, but they needed help.
That meant they needed to get out of occupied France
to non-occupied France,
and we sent them to a farmer, Mr. Noel Degout,
who was in Dienne,
a small town
an hour away from Poitiers.
And Mr. Degout was very clever,
and he had the farm which was partially in occupied France
and partially in non-occupied France,
and he saved thousands of people,
and he accepted all the people we sent him
and helped them cross.
But my sister Stephanie, with whom I walked on that
to help to send these people to Mr. Degout,
wrote to Mr. Degout a letter in which she put the topic
"Tobacco Voucher,"
that the young men we had helped cross into non-occupied France,
so Mr. Degout's property had forgotten it in our house.
And there were no paths to communication at that time
between Poitiers and to non-occupied France,
so we sent our mail to Mr. Degout,
who mailed it to non-occupied France
and sent us answers.
But my sister made the big mistake
of signing a real name on that letter,
and the Germans were suspicious of Mr. Degout,
but he was very clever, and they never had any evidence.
But when they got my sister's letter
that they stopped and read,
they came to the house and arrested her
and took her to their office to question her
because they wanted information about Mr. Degout
and what he was doing on his farm.
And my sister refused to give any information,
so they came back to the house and arrested my father
to put pressure on my sister to give the information.
But even in the presence of my father,
she absolutely refused to give any information
which would have been a denunciation of Mr. Degout.
So she was kept, and she was in prison for one month,
and she celebrated her 21st birthday
on July 10, 1942 in prison.
After that month, she was sent to a camp
on the fringes of Poitiers.
The camp was called the camp of Route de Limoges.
Limoges is a city south of Poitiers,
and you can find the camp, the camp of Route de Limoges
in Google.
And see what kind of camp it was at that time.
And she was a medical student,
and she started to give medical care
to the foreign Jews
who were in the camp until then,
until June --
Now, we were in July. Until July 1942.
These children had received no medical care
whatsoever in the camp,
and only the foreign Jews had been arrested.
The French Jews had not yet been arrested,
but my sister was sent to the camp with these foreign Jews,
and I told you that she gave them medical care.
She had very poor tools, but it was better than nothing.
But when we went, the family wanted to escape.
We had found two French guardians in the camp
who accepted to help her escape.
She refused because she felt that what she was doing
for the children was too important,
so I went to see her.
In the camp, we could see one person of the family
once a week,
and one week, I went to see her and reminded her
that her mother needed her as much as the children,
and she answered me,
"Don't you realize that if I escape,
you're all going to be arrested?"
So on my way back to home,
I decided that we were all going,
all the members of the families still in Poitiers --
several had left --
were going to cross into unoccupied France
so that my sister can escape, too.
And we were able to do it, and you have to read my book
to read that beautiful story
how the help we got to escape.
But my sister never escaped,
and she was deported on September 21, 1942,
to an unknown destination.
And in her last letter that she hold to a friend
because she couldn't write to us --
We were already in unoccupied France,
and I told you there were no postal communications
between the two sectors.
So she hold to a friend in Poitiers,
and in the... she added,
"In the last rumors,
we are leaving for Metz to work,
so no need to dramatize."
These are the last words she ever wrote
because years, years later,
we found out that she had been sent to Auschwitz,
and she never came back.
So after that, Mr. Degout could never do anything anymore.
But he got, in 2011, the title of Righteous Among the Nations
from the Museum of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
-Thank you for sharing that.
And your sister, like many people in your family,
she was certainly a hero.
And our last question of the day,
and I think this is a great way to end it.
Shannon B wants to know,
"What lessons did you learn from this experience?"
-You know, I did --
You are students, so I'm going to give you -- to tell you
I refuse to give advice to others.
But to students, it's okay.
What I learned from that is that you have to be engaged.
Everybody can make a difference,
but you have to be engaged for that.
And so, certain advice I give
is do not accept any order
that your conscience would refuse.
So these are the two things I get out of my --
But what is extremely important is to be engaged.
-Thank you so much for being here today.
Thank you so much for sharing your amazing story
with all of these students all over the country.
And, students and teachers, thank you so much
for joining us today.
And, before we go, I do want to let you all know
about our next student Webinar
that we have coming up,
and this one is called
"World War II Innovation and Problem Solving,"
and our STEM specialist here at the museum, Rob Wallace,
will be joining me, where we talk all about
how World War II innovators
had to solve these big problems
in order for the Allied Powers to be successful.
Again, thank you, Marthe.
Thank you, everyone out there.
Thank you, Chrissy, behind the scenes.
We hope to see you again at our next student Webinar.
Bye, everyone.