The Jewish Community of Paris, France
On the eve of World War II approximately 200,000 Jews lived in Paris, two-thirds of the French Jewish population. 25% of Parisian Jews were veteran French citizens while the remainder were immigrants, most of whom had come from Eastern Europe after World War I. Only one third of the immigrants became French citizens, among them Jews from Germany who left in the 1930s after the Nazis' rise to power.
After the surrender of France in June 1940, Paris passed to German control and the hunt for Jews began in the spring of 1941. Those who were caught were sent to detention camps that were established within the city and in the suburbs, and the deportations from these camps to Auschwitz-Birkenau commenced in March 1942. The largest roundup of foreign Jews in Paris started on 16 July 1942, and was perpetrated by French policemen following German orders. Within one week, some 13,000 Jews had been arrested, and either incarcerated in the Velodrome d'Hiver (Winter Stadium) or sent straight to Drancy. The families in the stadium were confined there for several days, after which they were transferred to detention camps near Paris. In the course of July and August they were deported to Auschwitz, most of them without their young children.
On 8 November 1942 the Germans took control of southern France. From 1943 onwards, Jews with French citizenship were also arrested by the French and Germans all over France, and sent eastward. At liberation, only some 40,000 Jews remained in Paris.
The Vigder Family
David and Ita Wigder got married in Paris in 1926. Neither of them was born in France: David reached Paris from Romania at the age of 26, while Ita moved to Paris from Poland when she was six years old. A talented artist, David painted and printed on cloth for a living, and Ita was a housewife. They had two children, Clairette and Isidor. Like her father, Clairette would take every opportunity to draw and would embellish her notebooks with illustrations.
At the beginning of World War II, David was drafted to the Foreign Legion and later released. In January 1943, he was summoned to the police station. On returning home he collected a few belongings together, including his daughter's first tooth to fall out, and was then deported to the Drancy camp. From Drancy he was sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp, where he was murdered in February 1943.
Following David's arrest, Ita decided to search for a hiding place for her children. With the assistance of the OSE, she found shelter for them with Christian families, while she herself hid in a separate location. While apart, mother and children wrote to each other. Ita told Clairette that if she was doing well, she should draw hearts in her letters, and if she was miserable, she should draw a boat, hoping in this way to assess the wellbeing of her children from afar.
Three months after going into hiding, the children were moved to a Jewish orphanage in Paris and in January 1944 they were taken in by a family in the village of Bonnetable, where they stayed until the war's end. Several individuals who hid the children during the war were later recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations: Marie and Lucien Noel, Georgette Schwartz and Lucienne de L'Epine.
After liberation, Ita was reunited with her children and they returned to their apartment in Paris. Ita succumbed to illness in 1956, and three years later Clairette and Isidor immigrated to Israel.
