Resistance fighter smuggled hundreds of Jewish children to safety in Switzerland
During the darkest days of World War II in France, Georges Loinger was escorting Jewish children to Annemasse, the border town from where he would organise their escape to neutral Switzerland, when he encountered a group of German soldiers on the train. Already one step ahead, he told them the children were refugees from bombed Marseille, travelling to a health camp.
When the train arrived at Annemasse, one of the German officers offered to escort the group, saying: ‘‘Listen, these kids are tired. Let us hasten the exit procedure. I’ll tell the police you’re with us.’’
Years later, Loinger, who has died aged
108, recalled the extraordinary sight that followed: ‘‘Fifty
German soldiers, singing, en route through the city of Annemasse, with 50 Jewish children and me marching in step behind! Once we reached the reception centre, the convoy came to a halt. The German saluted me, and the children and I went in, seen to the door under official German protection.’’
Thanks in part to his Aryan looks (he had blue eyes and blond hair), Loinger – himself a Jew – escaped detection working at the heart of the French resistance. He helped to smuggle hundreds of Jewish children to safety after their parents had been killed or sent to Nazi concentration camps.
Many had been sheltered in chateaux, but faced imminent danger and needed to escape the country. The Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE), with whom he worked, is estimated to have succeeded in getting some
2000 children to Switzerland. ‘‘It is probable,’’ wrote Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt in Flight from the Reich, ‘‘that Georges Loinger alone was responsible for half that number.’’
Before smuggling the children to safety, Loinger visited them to prepare them for their escape and survival, teaching them exercises and running. He then helped to arrange their travel to Annemasse, where he often placed them in the hands of smugglers.
He also devised some of his own ingenious methods to get the children across the frontier. ‘‘I spotted a football pitch that was on the border. It was made up of fences two-anda-half metres high,’’ he said. ‘‘I told them we are going to play with a ball like we used to do. I threw the ball 100m towards the Swiss border and told the children to run and get the ball. They ran after the ball and this is how they crossed the border. This is how their lives were saved.’’
At other times he would hold matches on the pitch, and a few children would sneak under the barbed wire before the game was up. There were always fewer children in his returning group, but no-one noticed.
In another audacious bid, he took the children to a cemetery with people dressed up as mourners. He then used a gravedigger’s ladder to ferry the children over the wall and into Switzerland. He often said he was successful in his endeavours to save children, ‘‘because I did not look Jewish and I walked with great naturalness’’.
Georges Loinger was born in Strasbourg, near the French border with Germany, to Solomon Loinger and his wife, Mina (nee Werzberg). His cousin, a fellow resistance fighter, was Marcel Marceau, the actor and mime artist. During his teenage years, Loinger belonged to the young Zionist movement Hatikvah (Hope) and had a keen interest in German and world affairs.
An athletic young man, he studied engineering and then took up teaching physical education with, he said, ‘‘the intention of preparing and training Jewish youth for the ordeal that awaited them’’. Aged 29, he was mobilised in the French army but was later captured and sent to a prison camp near Munich. From there, he said that he managed to escape with his cousin and make his way back to France to help his wife, Flore. She was taking care of a group of Jewish children that Germaine, Baroness Edouard de Rothschild, had managed to secure from the Nazis at a great price after their parents were imprisoned in Germany.
Loinger had known Flore as a teenager and they married in 1934. She died in 1995. They had two sons, Daniel, who later often accompanied his father on educational trips, and Guy, who became an economist and died in 2012.
After his escape, he began to work for the OSE, which hid and protected children in houses around the country. ‘‘But, starting in the summer of 1942, our strategy changed,’’ he recalled. After the German invasion of the Free Zone, it became too dangerous to house the children together. ‘‘The decision was taken to disperse the children under our care and to send them abroad to areas where they would be safe from deportation.’’
By 1944 he knew that the Germans were looking for him and, on one occasion, the Gestapo raided the OSE offices. Nevertheless, he managed to continue his mission until liberation.
After the war, he opened an accommodation centre for former prisoners of war and deportees. In 1947 he worked for Aliyah Bet, an illegal immigration campaign to help Holocaust survivors migrate to Palestine, and played a role in preparing the ship Exodus for sailing when it stopped in France. He later became the French director of ZIM, the Israeli national shipping company.
In 1951 he went to Israel to meet David BenGurion, the prime minister. The French government honoured Loinger in 2005 by naming him Commander of the Military Legion of Honour.
He once recalled that, at a family meal years after the war, he discovered his sister Fanny had also been part of the resistance. ‘‘She said to me, ‘It seems that you did stuff during the war?’ I said, ‘Yes, what about you?’ ‘Stuff too!’ ’’ –
Years after the war, he discovered his sister Fanny had also been part of the resistance. ‘‘She said to me, ‘It seems that you did stuff during the war?’ I said, ‘Yes, what about you?’ ‘Stuff too!’ ’’