Couple who gave hope to children of Holocaust
While researching her new book, Irish author Emma Donoghue uncovered one couple’s remarkable acts of heroism
IGOOGLED “Holocaust Nice”. I wanted the protagonist of my novel — a 79-year-old New Yorker investigating his roots — to go back to that Mediterranean city to find out how his mother had spent the annees noires of World War II (the dark years, as the French call them). I was looking for Resistance activity with which a Catholic woman could plausibly have been involved. I tried again: “Holocaust Nice Riviera France children.” That’s when I found a reference to “Moussa and Odette Abadi, who created the Reseau Marcel (Marcel Network) in Nice. They saved 527 children from deportation.”
How on earth had the Abadis worked this miracle? By bravery, I found out, but also by strategy and improvisation; by being persuasive enough to enlist others in their most righteous of causes.
The daughter of garment factory owners in Paris, Odette Rosenstock, born in 1914, qualified as a doctor during the Spanish Civil War, working in internment camps on the border and smuggling out some of the refugees she treated. Born in Syria in 1907, Moussa Abadi grew up in slum conditions in the Jewish ghetto in Damascus. Educated by Catholic priests at a day school in the city, he came to Paris in 1933 to do a PhD on French medieval theatre. He was also a serious actor, touring New York with a French troupe for five months. He and Rosenstock met through student friends in 1939 and fell in love at once.
Abadi’s busy, cultured life was interrupted when the Germans invaded the following year. On a borrowed bike, he fled Paris, and after it was stolen on the first night, he continued south on foot.
Meanwhile, new anti-Semitic laws stopped Rosenstock from working as a doctor, so she turned to midwifery. Abadi begged her to join him in Nice, where he was setting up a network to help Jews across the South.
She had to wade across a river at an unguarded point in the border to get from Occupied France into the socalled Free Zone run by the Vichy puppet government. In November 1942, Nice was occupied by Italian forces, which were not focused on anti-Semitic persecution like their Nazi allies, so the city became a magnet for 50,000 Jews from all over Europe. But Abadi and Rosenstock feared for the future, so, from spring 1943, they started making preparations, arranging hiding places for Jewish children in Christian institutions and with families, as well as forging baptismal certificates and ration cards.
Under the noms de guerre of “Monsieur Marcel” and “Sylvie Delattre”, they recruited other Jewish resistance members, such as Abadi’s old friend, Maurice Brener, who got them funding — mostly American Jewish donations, smuggled in via Portugal, Switzerland or by British parachutes. The couple managed to draw Christian helpers into their Marcel Network, too, notably Monseigneur Paul Remond, the Bishop of Nice. “I gave him the opportunity to live the Gospel,” Abadi explained.
Disaster struck in September 1943, when the Italians pulled out of the war and the Germans swooped into Nice; an SS unit hunted Jews through the streets. The Marcel Network had documents and homes (along the coast and in the hinterland) ready for 140 children. They hid them in a cellar in Nice, drilled them on their new identities, then smuggled them out of town. By the end of the war in 1944, they’d managed to hide — or smuggle out to Spain or Switzerland — 529 children, some only toddlers.
They made sure to keep three separate copies of each file so the children’s true identities wouldn’t be lost. Just two were captured and killed; 527 survived. An estimated 11,000 Jewish children were shipped from France to the death camps, in total.
In April 1944, Odette Rosenstock was denounced to the Vichy paramilitaries, arrested and deported. Assigned to work as a health inspector at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where her mother and sister, she learnt, had already died, she certified everyone as healthy so they wouldn’t be sent to the ovens. Sent on to Bergen-Belsen, she caught typhus and somehow survived a threeweek coma. Meanwhile, Abadi managed to evade capture. As soon as Nice was liberated in August 1944, he set to work reuniting the hidden children with their loved ones, though many of their parents — and sometimes whole families — had been murdered.
When Allied troops entered Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, Rosenstock felt it her duty to stay on to treat desperately sick inmates, no matter how much she longed for freedom and Abadi. It was only months later, in Nice, that he received a crumpled note: “Odette is alive.”
In my new novel, Akin, my protagonist Noah finds photos his mother took of individuals he finally identifies as Abadi and Rosenstock and their comrade Brener, but he can’t tell how to interpret them: could she have been helping these heroes, or working as a double agent? In using the Marcel Network as a back story to my fiction, I had qualms about portraying those Christians who aided the Jewish resistance, because I’d hate to leave readers with an exaggerated sense of how many non-Jews had the conscience and guts to step up — especially considering all these who cheered on the Nazi genocide, or attentistes (waitand-seers) who did nothing. Most Jews who did escape, owed their survival to the heroism of their fellows. The extraordinary Rosenstock and Abadi turned out to be typical of child-savers during the Holocaust: a tiny cohort of Jewish activists, risking their lives.
Theirs is a story like no other I know. It is a tiny comfort to know that the two of them finally married in 1959, and had a long life together, in Nice and then in Paris. Rosenstock specialised in TB and venereal disease; she campaigned for legalised abortion and was a psychotherapy pioneer. Abadi became a celebrated theatre critic and radio host. Until their deaths (his in 1997, hers in 1999), they spoke little of what happened; like many survivors, it seems they couldn’t forgive themselves for not having done more. Their full story was only told by human-rights journalist Fred Coleman in a Newsweek piece published in 2013.
There’s a photograph of the lovers walking along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice in 1943, arm in arm under the palm trees. I remembered that image on Bastille Day in 2016, just weeks after my family and I had left Nice after two years there, when a terrorist in a truck sped along the famous boulevard, mowing down crowds of revellers, killing 86.
I cling to the image of Odette and Moussa, who’d seen the world at its most evil, still managing to go for a stroll and smile in the sun.
‘Akin’ by Emma Donoghue is published by Picador, €23.80
‘By 1944, they’d managed to hide 529 children’