Georges Loinger; smuggled Jewish children to safety in World War II

It had all started as a game. During World War II, when hundreds of Jewish children were hidden at chateaus in the French countryside, kept out of sight from the nation’s Nazi occupiers and Vichy collaborators, Georges Loinger entertained them with calisthenics, soccer matches and ball games.

Tall and athletic, Loinger was a Jewish engineer turned physical-education teacher, whose blond hair and blue eyes helped him “pass” as a non-Jew while he traveled across France, secretly visiting the chateaus and other makeshift refugee centers to keep his young wards healthy with exercise.

But as anti-Semitic legislation gave way to mass deportations and murder, his exercise routines turned into a morbid form of training, preparation for the day in which Loinger would, if everything went smoothly, smuggle the children across the border into neutral Switzerland. As a grim backup, it was also preparation in case the children were discovered and sent to a concentration camp.

Loinger, who had served in the French army and escaped from a German prisoner-of-war camp before joining the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, a Jewish relief organization known as the OSE, became one of the war’s most daring smugglers of Jewish children, shepherding them across the Swiss border using schemes that involved the very games he had once taught them for fun and exercise.

While estimates vary, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, or JDC, credits the OSE with smuggling 2,000 children into Switzerland. “It is probable,” Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt wrote in “Flight From the Reich,” a history of Jewish refugees in the Nazi era, “that Georges Loinger alone was responsible for half that number.”

Loinger, whom Le Monde described as the “dean of the Jewish resistance in occupied France,” was 108 when he died Friday at his home in Paris. His death was confirmed by Jean-François Guthmann, president of the OSE, who said he did not know the precise cause.

A cousin of Marcel Marceau, the French mime and fellow resistance fighter, Loinger’s smuggling efforts began in earnest in early 1943 as Nazi authorities accelerated their crackdown on Jews living in France. Some 77,000 Jews in the country were killed, primarily at the Auschwitz death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Fluent in German, with a cover story as the physical-education instructor for a Vichy-backed youth organization, Loinger based his smuggling campaign in the town of Annemasse, just across the Swiss border from Geneva. The town’s mayor, Jean Deffaugt, introduced him to a network of paid “passeurs,” or smugglers, who ferried many of the children from one side of the border to the other.

But it was Loinger who often did the smuggling himself, evading the Gestapo and sometimes carrying small children on his back.