OUR LOVE TRIUMPHED OVER EVIL
On 73rd wedding anniversary, couple recalls falling in love at concentration camp
THEY had everything going against their romance.
But Max and Hanne Liebmann overcame incredible obstacles — separation, serious illness and the horrors of the Nazis — after falling in love in a most unlikely place: a concentration camp. Now, as the Queens couple celebrate their 73rd wedding anniversary on April 14, they are honoring the strangers who saved their lives.
An exhibit, “Conspiracy of Goodness: How French Protestants Rescued Thousands of Jews during WWII,” at the Kupferberg Holocaust Center at Queensborough Community College, uses the stories of the Liebmanns and others to spotlight the villagers of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France — who sheltered thousands of French Jews during World War II.
“The people of Le Chambon were outstanding, risking their lives for strangers,” said Hanne, 93. “They restored our faith in mankind.”
She and Max were teens when their families were deported from Germany to a camp in Gurs, France, in October 1940. Originally a place of internment for political refugees from the Spanish Civil War, it became a concentration camp inn which more than 18,000 Jews were imprisoned during WWII — and fromm which 6,000 prisoners were shipped on to death camps.
Hanne Hirsch (her maiden name) was 15 when she arrived in Gurs with herr mother, Ella. The girl was assigned to work in the office of the women’s block, along-side Jeanne Liebmann — whose son Max was allowed to visit.
Hanne was immediately drawn to the skinny teenager — “we all looked like skeletons in the camp but there was a certain attraction” — and delighted when he offered to walk with her to gather rations at an adjacent Swiss Red Cross barracks.
“There was no privacy for dating, but we saw each other every day,” she recalled. “Max was allowed unlimited tickets to visit other people because of the fact he was a musician.”
Within weeks they had fallen in love. “The conditions were horrible, but we [had] a cultural life, and I was attracted by Max’s interpretation of music,” she said. Thanks to a group of Quakers who donated instruments, the camp had an orchestra, in which Max played cello, as well as an opera ensemble.
But the teens were separated when the Children’s Aid Society got approval to move children out of Gurs. “In September 1941, I was transferred to Le Chambon, a Huguenot village where refugees like me were warmly welcomed and protected,” Hanne said.
SHE was no longer imprisoned, but Hanne’s survival still depended on keeping a low profile. Periodically, French police, acting for the Vichy government collaborating with their Nazi occupiers, would swoop through Le Chambon in search of Jews, but villagers would deny they were sheltering any “undesirables.”
“Max was not so lucky; he was sent to a boy scout camp where organizers denied him the false [identity] papers arranged for other boys because he was not Orthodox.” (Some Jews were able to escape France with the help of false IDs that labeled them as non-Jews.)
Their separation might have been the end of the relationship — and of Max — had Hanne not made a heartrending 1,000-mile round-trip journey across France in August 1942. “A relative wrote to tell me my mother was ill, so I traveled back to Gurs, which was under lockdown.” Although she was free to venture from Le Chambon, she was also in huge danger as she had no false papers at a time when Jews were being deported to the death camps
“[My mother and I] had a sshouted exchange over rows of barbed wire. She gave me motherly advice, but I can’t remember the exact words because it was so uupsetting.
“Two days later I saw her in the freight yard, where she was on a train waiting to be transported. She didn’t know where she was going, but she knew she was not coming back. It was the last time I saw her.” (Ella Hirsch perished at Auschwitz.)
Aware of the intensifying round-ups by the Nazis, Hanne made a detour on her way back to Le Chambon, to Max’s scout camp near Lyon, France. “I told him if he wanted to survive he
needed to get to Le Chambon,” Hanne recalled.
Within weeks, Max arrived. “He didn’t ask permission — he just left,” said Hanne. But they were only able to see each other twice, as the need to stay in the shadows had grown with news of the increased Nazi round-ups.
“We were hidden by farmers; I was in a house and Max was in a hayloft,” Hanne said. “He managed to find me [three weeks later, when] he decided to make his escape from France.” In Le Chambon, where one forger alone created hundreds of false IDs, Max received papers identifying him as a Frenchman, Charles Lang.
Switzerland was the closest border, and Hanne had relatives there whose address she gave to Max. The young lovers vowed to reunite: “I thought I might as well try to get there too, even though Le Chambon seemed safe,” explained Hanne. “When you see a deportation train [of Jews being transferred to death camps going by], you know [it is time to flee].”
Max, now 96, recalled how his perilous escape involved scrambling up and down mountains — only to be denied entry by Swiss guards at the border. “I got away by disobeying their orders,” he said. “Instead of walking back into France, I walked deeper into Switzerland, where a priest gave me money for the train. He told me to take a local because the expresses were being searched.
“I managed to reach Lausanne, where there was a Jewish community center two minutes from the station. As I walked in, they said: ‘Welcome to Switzerland. We will have to turn you over to the Swiss police, but nothing bad will happen to you now. ’ ”
Five months later, it was Hanne’s turn. “I had false papers stating I was Anne-Marie Husser, a Parisienne,” she recalled. Challenged over whether she was Jewish, she managed to spit out to the customs agent: “I have nothing to do with that dirty race.”
AFEW weeks later, the couple was reunited in Berne, Switzerland, where Hanne was staying with relatives. She recalled the euphoria and relief of being with her true love once again.
“I can’t remember whether we did any more than walk and talk — [just that] we were so overwhelmed with the wonderfulness of being alive and realizing we had both made it,” she said.
They married in Geneva weeks before the war ended in May 1945 and lived in a series of refugee homes in Switzerland, where Hanne gave birth to their only child, Evelyne, the following year.
The family emigrated to New York, where both had relatives, in 1948, but were separated yet again two years later. “[Max and I] had tuberculosis and were sent to a sanatorium for two years,” Hanne said. “We couldn’t share a room, but the worst thing was we couldn’t see our daughter for a year because doctors were afraid she would pick up the infection.”
Evelyne was fostered “by a very kind woman who took good care of her,” during that time, Hanne said. She and Max would call their daughter “every Sunday and we sent her little presents . . . so she would know we were always thinking about her.”
After the war, the couple discovered that all the relatives with whom they were deported had perished. In a tragic twist, Hanne’s brother Alex had reached safe haven in New York in 1937, but she was never to see him again: “He volunteered for the US Army and never came back from the war,” she said.
With the help of a US government program, Max studied to be an accountant. Hanne, who still volunteers at Queensbor- ough Community College, worked in a medical office for many years. The two dote on their grandson and two greatgranddaughters.
Arriving in New York, Max was also able to once again have a cello of his own. “A New York dealer in stringed instruments was very kind to Max and let him have a cello for $100,” recalled Hanne. “He was so happy to have an instrument again after so many years without.”
He later bought a much more expensive instrument, “but I sold it in 2016,” said Max. After 80 years, he finally gave up music: “You need other people to play chamber music with and those I played with were gone.”
Despite the forces that worked to keep them apart, Hanne said their romance was meant to be: “We [always] held on to the belief that we would see each other again.
“We were the luckiest of people to get out of the concentration camp, and even more so that we got to a place like Le Chambon. Otherwise you wouldn’t be talking to us today.”