Last winter, my brother was invited to speak at West Point regarding his business as an investment adviser. He met with senior officers and then addressed cadets studying finance and involved in the investment club. He started the presentation by thanking the U.S. military:
“I am here because the U.S. Army liberated the small town of Corps, France, where my mother was hiding out on a farm, in August 1944. I will be forever grateful.”
Later he searched the Internet for pictures of Corps – a small town in the Isère Rhône-Alpes region – and found pictures of two French girls handing flowers to American soldiers in a tank liberating the town on August 21, 1944. He e-mailed the pictures to my sister, my mother, and me. My mother grew very emotional as she recognized the main street of Corps, and memories flooded back of being liberated by the Americans, who gave children her age chocolate bars.
My mother suffered from respiratory problems growing up in Paris, and in 1939 my grandparents took her to La Bourboule in the Auvergne region to “take the waters.” When war broke out, my grandparents decided not to return to Paris with my mother but to remain there for the duration of the war – a decision that probably saved their lives.
I still don’t understand under what circumstances my maternal great-grandparents, my grandmother’s brother, and my mother’s abandoned/orphaned cousin joined them, but the entire family (plus a newborn aunt) was able to survive the war away from Nazi-occupied Paris by going into hiding in La Bourboule from 1939 to 1943 and later in the village of Corps, France, from 1943 to liberation in August 1944.
My mother rarely spoke about the war years. It wasn’t until a few years ago at a discussion session at our synagogue that she revealed she and her family were Holocaust survivors. We had heard bits and pieces of stories about the war years, but they were vague recollections of a young girl and other family members and we weren’t sure if they were real or imagined.
It was an important part of her life, but not one she readily shared outside of providing basic details for a 5th-grade social studies project. Even though her immediate family survived, it was clearly a shrouded and painful period, rarely discussed.
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At my brother’s birthday dinner last year my mother mused aloud about her interest in returning to the small villages and hamlets where she was hidden as a young girl. We humored her by offering to accompany her but we didn’t think she would want to return to this earlier and apparently difficult time in her life.
Over time, her desire to return and rediscover her wartime past increased as she realized that if she didn’t do so now, after 70 years, it might not ever happen. She was especially curious to see if people remembered her family and if she would be able to recognize the towns from many years ago.
In May I volunteered to accompany my mother to France because I knew the mountainous towns were remote and would require travel by trains, buses, and cars. My second cousin from London also joined us as he was interested in learning about my mother’s and our common great-grandparents’ history.
Writing letters to the mayors of Corps and La Bourboule was emotionally difficult, because my mother wasn’t sure about the reception we would receive, especially given concerns about the current rise of anti-Semitism in France, and we all agreed to have low expectations in case there was a lukewarm reception or, worse yet, no willingness to recollect at all.
