Jewish Kids Saved from the Nazi Camps, Cheilly-lès-Maranges, Saône-et-Loire (71)

The daily newspaper Le Journal de Saône-et-Loire (TJSL) mainly covers news from that département and sometimes beyond, and today (8 August 2022) it had a fascinating article on four Jewish children.

Between March and May 1943, the organisation L'Entraide temporaire sent four children from Paris to the relative safety of Cheilly-lès-Maranges, where each child was housed in a different host family, went to school and lived as normal a life as was possible under Nazi France. It goes without saying that the risk each host family was taking was enormous, and any leak of information would certainly have resulted in death for all concerned.

By a quirk of circumstance, Anne Marie Phal was the only host parent to have been awarded the title of 'Juste parmi les nations', an honour created in 1953 by the Israeli parliament for civilians who saved Jews during the war. There is a sentence translated from the Talmud on a new plaque on the grave: 'Quiconque sauve une vie sauve l'univers tout entier': 'Anyone who saves a life saves the whole universe.'

The plaque stems from the research of René Maré, who was Anne Marie Phal's nephew, and who at the time he put the original plaque in place (2019) only knew the names of three of the children. Consequently the plaque mentioned the fourth as 'un garçon au nom inconnu': René never thought he would be able to put a name to him.

However, in a few paragraphs which appear as additions to the main text, 'Comment avons-nous retrouvé [l'inconnu'] ?', LJSL says that after questioning people in the village they found memories understandably hazy or quite simply incorrect. But then, as if by magic, a book written in the 1980s, containing a chapter on Cheilly and the hidden children, and published in 2021, appears: this is Danielle Kupecek Domankiewicz's Une Constellation dans la nuit. This didn't quite reveal the boy's name, although the author – now in her eighties, is still alive and remembers his name. René Beugelmans is 88, and has now been added to the names of the other children on the plaque: Jacques Schmelz, Rose Tabacznik and Rachel Schmelz, whose life Anne Marie Phal saved. The plaque is also a memory of the other host families involved: Bourgeon, Meunier, Fremin and Ménages.