Une Fleur Au Chapeau

Biography

Henri G. (HVT-2096) was born in Poland in 1925, one of four children. He recalls moving with his family to Danzig when he was about five, then to Paris in 1932 due to an antisemitic attack on his father; forming lifelong friendships in his Jewish neighborhood; attending public school; learning Yiddish and German songs from his father; evacuation when war began in 1939, then returning home; evacuation with his family to Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne after German invasion in 1940; returning to Paris in early 1941; his father’s arrest in May; visiting him once in Pithiviers; his older brother traveling to the unoccupied zone using false papers; a non-Jewish family hiding his younger sister; visiting his girlfriend; obtaining false papers; traveling with his younger brother to join their older brother in Castres; the local rabbi placing them in a Joint program in Lautrec; writing to his girlfriend daily; forming a resistance unit with eight friends in 1943; receiving parachute drops from British and United States planes; expansion of their unit to approximately 400; a German attack in which eight of them were killed; requisitioning supplies from civilians; dynamiting an SS train; liberating Castres; punishing local collaborators; joining the French military; battles up to the crossing of the Rhine; demobilization in October 1945; learning his girlfriend, her family, and his parents had been deported and what that meant; seeking her in Alençon; her return to Paris; their marriage; futile attempts to get his parents’ apartment back (they did not survive); and his daughter’s birth. Mr. G. discusses his wife’s nightmares; silence about those who had been deported for many years after the war; and listening to his wife, but not asking her questions, not wanting to cause her pain.

Unedited Testimony