Paulette Terwilliger shares her family's account of surviving the Holocaust in occupied France

00:00 I was born quite a long time ago, in 1942, and so this was the height of the final solution, when Hitler had pronounced that all Jews would no longer be alive. My parents were in Paris at the time, as well as my grandparents and their six children. And so it was, of course, a very difficult time. My grandfather was a rabbi, and it was a religious family. And in 1941, my grandfather was in the first roundup of the Jews in Paris. He had visited a friend, and a friend was not at home. And what happened to. As he was waiting for his friend, the french police arrived. They took him away, and he was sent to Pitiv, that was a french concentration camp. So that was in May of 1941 that he was taken away. Paris was divided into the free zone, and the zone that was supposed to have a french government led by Petain.

01:24 Petain. Marshal Petain.

01:26 Marshal Petain. And he had been a hero during the First World War. And so Petain put in place ordinances against the Jews at a very early time, and was very much. It was very much a puppet government from the Nazis. Because my parents had recently married, they were a young couple. My father decided to go to what was supposed to be the free zone to find a place for us not to be arrested. My mother, I wasn't born yet, but my mother stayed back. She didn't know at the time that she was expecting me. And my father left without knowing that. He left with a friend, and the police arrested them. They had false identity papers. In Pradine, which is also in the southwestern part of France, there were villages who were willing to take in Jews. It was very difficult to make your way to the free zone. You had to have some kind of paper. And of course, my mother didn't have that, but she had a friend who said to her, my sisters, my two sisters are going to the free zone, and they have a passeur, and you are welcome to be with them. And very often they were part of the french resistance. And so by that time I was born, so she and the two sisters went to be in the free zone. The passeur had brought them to the hotel. Yes. And he said that tomorrow I will come back, and I will take you to where you want me to take you, to the free zone. And so he said, I will be back at 05:00 and the pastor is a french person. It's a french person, yes. The next day, he came at 05:00 in the morning, and he said, I'm going to take you and you pointing to the french sisters, but not you pointing at my mother because you have a baby and that's too dangerous. Soon after that, she heard screams outside and she looked out the window and the two sisters were in the truck. And of course, they were on their way to a french concentration camp, actually. So the fact that he didn't take my mother and me probably was providence, as I have no memory of that time at all. When I base all these stories is because my mother was very, she was, she needed to tell me those stories from a very young age. My father was not like that. My father never spoke about his experience. And I think Holocaust survivors, many of them, have a need to talk about it, and also because they want to teach something about life so that it would never happen again. But many survivors are not able to talk about the horrors of that period of time.

05:15 What would you like us to learn so that the, this doesn't happen again? What would you advise us to learn?

05:24 Yes, I think it's very important. And to learn from that time. Sometimes I feel a little. I feel that we have not learned as much as we should, particularly at this time, when there is quite a lot of anti semitism in european countries as well, I am sad to say, in the United States.

05:54 Are you feeling that here?

05:56 I'm not feeling that in Farrington. I read a lot about things that are happening, particularly in cities, in large cities as New York. The United States was always the place where you would find freedom and you would be secure.