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| Nadine, the last female Holocaust survivor in my family, left us. Her brother wrote: "She and I together survived hell, being hunted like animals in Paris during the war". |
Tonight I got this sad message from my American cousin.
My sister Nadine (Simone) died last Friday after a long stay in an assisted living facility near her son Alex's home in Phoenix AZ. She was 96 years old. I can’t begin to convey the impact. She and I together survived hell, being hunted like animals in Paris during the war, and went on to lead interesting and hopefully valued lives. For whatever we disagreed on, she loved me dearly, and I will miss her beyond words.
My "French family". Eleonora Noz was one of my grandfather Gabriel's sisters. She, her husband Sascha, and little son Albert (standing on the right) were transported separately from France to Auschwitz. At the same time, my grandfather Gabriel Rozental and my grandmother Helena were transported to Treblinka and murdered there.Wednesday, February 2, 2011. Managing to find my mother's cousins between 1945 and 1996. Where are you? France? USA? Australia? Sweden?
My "French family". Eleonora Noz was one of my grandfather Gabriel's sisters. She, her husband Sascha, and little son Albert (standing on the right) were transported separately from France to Auschwitz. At the same time, my grandfather Gabriel Rozental and my grandmother Helena were transported to Treblinka and murdered there. Deportation History: During 1941, the anti-Semitic legislation applied in both zones of France (the German-occupied zone and the Vichy-controlled zone) was severely tightened. The French police carried out the first mass arrests in Paris in May 1941, during which 3,747 men were interned. Two more sweeps took place before the first deportation train (freight trains provided by the French state railways, SNCF) began rolling in March 1942. On July 16, 1942, the French police in Paris arrested 12,884 Jews—including 4,501 children and 5,802 women—during a raid that became known as La Grande Rafle (The Vel' d'Hiv Roundup). Most were temporarily interned in a sports arena under miserable conditions. After a few days, the prisoners were sent toward Germany in cattle cars, and some became the very first Jews to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Many historians believe that a worse crime was committed in Vichy-controlled southern France than in the north. In August 1942, gendarmes were sent out to hunt down foreign refugees. However, as evidenced by the deportation lists compiled by the French police, children with French citizenship were deported in the exact same manner as those with Polish citizenship or those who were stateless. Approximately 11,000 Jews were transported to Drancy, which served as the primary transit camp on the way to extermination in Auschwitz. During 1942, officials sent 41,951 Jews toward Germany, though the deportations came to a temporary halt when certain religious leaders warned the Vichy government of potential public backlash. Afterward, the arrests were carried out more discreetly. In 1943 and 1944, the regime deported 31,899 people—the last train left in August 1944. This occurred despite the fact that the Allies had landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944. Allied troops eventually liberated Paris on August 25, 1944. Of the total 75,721 people deported, fewer than 2,000 survived.
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https://jimbaotoday.blogspot.com/2011/02/att-hinna-att-hitta-min-mammas-kusiner.htmlAlbert and Bertha were my maternal grandfather's parents. My grandfather's name was Gabriel, and he had several siblings. Among them was Eleonora (Lola). Eleonora married Alexander (Sascha) Noz and eventually moved to Paris. She maintained contact with the family in Warsaw and returned for major family events, such as weddings. On one occasion, Eleonora brought her eldest daughter, Simone, with her. Simone and my mother were cousins. When Simone came from Paris to Warsaw, she would mix several French words into her speech when speaking Polish. Then came the Holocaust! In 1945, my mother contacted the IRC, the International Red Cross, searching for her family in France. As for the Polish branch of the family, she had been an eyewitness to their deportation to the Treblinka extermination camp. My mother's father, Gabriel Rozental, and her mother Helena, were murdered in Treblinka. All of my mother's paternal aunts and her uncles were murdered in Treblinka: Aunt Irena (Rothaub) and her husband, Aunt Zofia and her husband, Aunt Eugenia with her husband and children, and Uncle Piotr.
In 1993, I conceived the idea to build a Name Monument in Stockholm to the memory of our closest relatives murdered in the Holocaust.
In 1994, I began asking my parents directly if they had any biological aunts or uncles. Personally, I only knew of one maternal and one paternal aunt, and I had never questioned what had happened to their siblings. I asked my mother how many there were and where they lived. Only then did I learn that she had an aunt who lived in Paris, and that there was a cousin whom she had met in Poland, with whom she used to play in the Saski Park.
In 1995, I was in Washington D.C., partly to study the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which was renowned as a name monument. I took the opportunity to contact the Holocaust Memorial Museum there, which has a massive research department. I asked them how I should go about searching for my missing relatives. Regarding my father's side of the family in the town of Pinsk, they provided an immediate answer: All residents of the ghetto were murdered in the final aktion of Oct 28 - Nov 1, 1942. It was Einsatzgruppe B that murdered my father's entire family there. Did Albert Noz possess the same type of documentation as Anny Horowitz?
In 1996, I began searching for my French family, since everyone who had lived in Warsaw and Pinsk before the war had been murdered. During that summer, I contacted a French organization in Paris and asked them for help. After six months, I received an email. My mother's aunt, her husband, and a younger cousin—10-year-old Albert—had been arrested by the French police. The family was sent to three different camps in France: the father, Sascha, to Compiègne; the mother, Lola, to Pithiviers; and their 10-year-old son to Drancy. All three were subsequently deported from the camps in France and murdered in the Auschwitz extermination camp during the summer of 1942.
They arrived at Auschwitz in freight cars on trains with convoy numbers 2, 14, and 20 (see the list). Simone, my mother's cousin whom she had met in Warsaw just before the war, was not included on those lists compiled by the French police for the German SS. Exact lists accompanied every train transport from France to the death camp in Poland.
Years 1995–1996. The last thing I did during that period was to publish a book, 6 tusen av 6 miljoner – ett requiem (6 Thousand out of 6 Million – A Requiem). The book contains unique documents collected from survivors in Sweden, as well as several articles describing both personal memories and Sweden's immigration policy from the time Hitler came to power in Germany. However, the largest part of the book consists of the names I collected as a foundation for the Holocaust Monument in Stockholm.
Included are Lola and her husband Sascha Noz, and their two children, Albert and Simone.
Simone will not let me sleep! The Germans and the French kept significantly better order of their deportations when it came to lists of the deported, and Simone was not on those lists.
Year 1996. What to do, Quo Vadis, where am I heading in my search?
Year 1997. Back to Paris and back to the Jewish research institute near the Seine. Back to boxes of documents regarding L'Enfant Caché (The Hidden Child).
Bingo!
I found a document stating that on September 29, 1942 (thus after the worst deportations to Auschwitz), Madame Moskowicz (with a Polish-Jewish-sounding name), who lived at Rue d'Angoulême, No. 101, Paris XI, applied for support for textiles and clothing for Simone. Simone spent one month in the children's home on Rue Lamarck, which was run by a Jewish organization (UGIF).
In 1997, my wife at the time, Joanna, called all the Moskowiczs in the Paris region. None of them knew anything about Simone and declared that they were Frenchwomen (with a capital F) and that it was their husbands who were Jewish... and were now deceased.
On the advice of L'Enfant Caché *, I place a missing person notice, No. 319, in their magazine: Simone Noz où êtes-vous? (Simone Noz, where are you?)
On the front page of issue No. 20 of the magazine, there is a picture of a girl who took the same train as Albert and met the same fate in Auschwitz. In issue No. 21 of the magazine, published in December 1997, my notice appeared in French...*
In 1998, I turned to the French archives, which held documents from the general census of 1946. Two addresses and the surrounding buildings were of interest:
Rue d'Angoulême, No. 101, Paris XI, and
Rue Bissone, No. 42, Paris XII.
Despite spending several days at the Archives de Paris, I found nothing! Did Simone not survive the war? Perhaps she married before 1946 and changed her name? If so, several extra days in the French archives awaited me to go through the marriage records. In those days, there was no data accessible for searching through computers.
I received a response to my notice. Unfortunately, it is completely anonymous. Finally, I got in touch with Jean, who claims to have been a boyfriend (friend) of Simone between 1945 and 1948. He also said that Simone's brother survived the war. Can I believe him? After all, I have Albert's name in black and white on the SS list, which meant certain death in the Auschwitz gas chambers.
I am given Simone's address and phone number in Palo Alto. Jean is a bit difficult to talk to, abrupt!
Palo Alto is a city in California, far away from Europe. Why there? No answer at the number I received from Jean, but a referral to another. My heart pounds anew!
However, I have reached a nursing home. None of the current staff (who sounded very young) had heard anything about Simone Noz.
Did Simone die at that home? I refuse to be convinced by what is perhaps the most realistic conclusion.
Meanwhile, I searched for all Noz families via the internet in the USA and wrote to all of them. No luck.
I returned to Paris and recounted all of my searching. Jean does not answer his phone, but the people at L'Enfant Caché manage to get in touch with him. He announces that in a month, he is going to meet a friend who knows for sure where Simone is located. He also promises to write to her himself (but will not give me her current address).
During the last week of November 1998, on Tuesday, November 25, I received a letter from Simone (Nadine). Short and without the slightest emotional involvement, as if she thought I was engaging in some sort of scam. I feel immensely hurt. That same day, I wrote a rather bitter reply.
On Saturday, November 29—it was a sunny day—the phone rings early in the morning. It is a weeping Simone-Nadine. She apologizes for her letter. But she had thought there was no one left alive from our family after the Holocaust. Soon we are both crying. The rest of our family reunion is just as sunny as this November day.
The story of a brother who survived the Holocaust is also cleared up. There was, you see, another, younger brother, Bert, whom we did not know about. We get to meet him that same year in December. My mother says he reminds her of his father.
In the summer of 1999, my mother met Simone (Nadine).
Albert Noz, 10 years old, born in Paris, a French citizen, was imprisoned in the Drancy camp by the French police. On August 17, he was taken to the Auschwitz extermination camp along with other Jewish children, some of whom held Polish or German citizenship. It was the French police who also handled the deportation, alongside the French railways, SNCF. Granted, SNCF apologized for its role in the World War II Jewish deportations (76,000 Jews). SNCF's CEO expressed his "deep sorrow and regret" for the consequences of their actions (though this was in connection with a lucrative US contract).
The youngest person in carriage No. 8 of deportation train No. 20 was a girl, Rotman Helene, 4 years old, born in Paris, a French citizen. She traveled with her older sister, Rotman Lisa, who was 8 years old. All the children were murdered immediately upon arrival at Auschwitz!
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Albert Noz, 10 years old, born in Paris, a French citizen, was imprisoned in the Drancy camp by the French police. On August 17, he was taken to the Auschwitz extermination camp along with other Jewish children, some of whom held Polish or German citizenship. It was the French police who also handled the deportation, alongside the French railways, SNCF.
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It took her five days to process it all and return my call. When she finally did, she just said, 'Romek,' and began to cry. We were finally reunited.Here is the transcript of the last pages of Nadine's book, describing how I found her. What is truly moving is that she was, in a way, still deeply affected by the trauma of the Holocaust. When describing me (Roman-Romek) or my mother (her cousin Lunia), she did not use our real names; instead, I became Jens Karlberg and my mother became Terenia. I still vividly remember our first telephone conversation. I was so overjoyed to finally speak to her after so many years of searching, celebrating the miracle of her survival. Yet, initially, she was as cold as stone. Having lived through such trauma, she simply couldn't believe that her cousin Lunia from Poland had actually survived. It took her five days to process it all and return my call. When she finally did, she just said, 'Romek,' and began to cry. We were finally reunited.
Also that summer found me again as a lecturer on a cruise ship for a twelve-day Mediterranean voyage. We went to Spain, Portugal, Italy, and France. I lectured on history, economy, art, and architecture. It was most enjoyable. I left the ship, which had been renamed Norway, but it was, in truth, the old venerable France, refurbished and one of the largest cruise ships afloat of the Norwegian cruise line.
Returning home, I resumed painting with new energy and did in the impressionistic style some large, colorful canvases of the south of France and of ladies with large hats in languid poses. The canvases were on exhibit in a gallery in Carmel. I had achieved some sort of professional status. I alternated my painting with writing surges. It has been ten years now that I have lived in my flat in San Francisco.
Recently, I received a letter that intrigued me greatly from an old friend of mine who still lived in Paris. He was one of the "Hidden children" saved from the Holocaust who shared my life briefly in Malmaison during the post-war years. He wrote that a Swedish man was looking for me, that I was his mother’s cousin. The man’s name was Jens Karlberg (Roman Wasserman Wroblewski), and he had been trying to find me and my brother. During his research in archives in France, he had not found our names on lists of Holocaust martyrs. In desperation, he put a small ad in a Paris paper, asking our whereabouts. One day he got the answers from my old friend, who remembered me from the orphanage of Malmaison, and who told him I was in America. I wrote, asking Jens Karlberg (Roman Wasserman Wroblewski) for more information. In response, I received a letter telling me that my mother’s niece, my first cousin, was alive and had three sons living in Sweden with their families. Jens was the youngest son.
By some miracle, my cousin, my mother Lola’s niece Terenia, was saved as a young woman from the burning Warsaw ghetto during the time of the Nazis. My mother was from Poland, and I had never heard of any of her relatives surviving after Kristallnacht, as the Germans entered Poland first. I knew that some of my father’s cousins were living in England, as I had found them on my first visit back to Europe, years before. I always visited them upon my trips to Europe. But on my mother’s side, no one, until now. It had taken Jens fifty years to find me and my brother Andy. As neither of us was on the list of the victims of the Holocaust, Jens knew a chance existed that we had survived. Because we were the “Hidden Children.” Survivors!
Great was my emotion when I spoke to my cousin Jens over the telephone. My cousin Terenia (Lunia, wife of Misza Wasserman Wroblewski) (Lunia Rozental), my mother’s niece, now an aged lady, spoke French to me across the miles and across time. Andy went to visit them in Stockholm and was received warmly. Our other cousin Krista (Krystyna, my mother´s younger sister) still lives in Warsaw and has a daughter (Helena-Lena) in the United States. So, the miracle goes on!
God has allowed me to have a new family, that of my dear mother. With my family, Gregg, Kitt, and their children Brad, ten, and Beth, four, we went to France in the summer of 1999 for the wedding of Andy and Ingrid’s youngest daughter, Anya. A new beginning, in so many ways. From two surviving orphans, our family now numbers more than fifty.
Blessed be the Lord. I am grateful that I can look with serenity at my past and hope that God will forgive my sins. I pray for the best in the new century. Whatever it brings, I only ask for health and peace. As Bufano would say, “Peace be with you.”
https://artistsacha.com/celebrity-gallery
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| Prince Albert of Monaco and "Sascha". |
