On 17 August 1944, before the evacuation of the Drancy concentration and transit camp near Paris by the Germans prior to their retreat from France, a group of 51 Jews was taken out of Drancy. They were Jewish underground members, who had been caught by the Germans in April and July 1944: members of L'Armee Juive (AJ), the Jewish Communist underground, the Dutch-Jewish underground and others. The Germans sent them clandestinely, for fear that their comrades would try and rescue them, and attached them to a German evacuation train. Among the deportees were Alfred Frenkel (known as "Zippi") and Paula Kaufman (later Welt) from the Dutch underground group caught by the Germans in Paris in the summer of 1944. Paris was liberated on 25 August 1944.
Alfred was born in 1920 in Breslau, Germany (today Wroclaw, Poland), to Max and Betty Frenkel. He had a younger sister, Vera. Max was a successful trader, and the family lived comfortably. Alfred was active in the German-Jewish youth movement, "Werkleute". The Frenkel family moved to Berlin in 1935. In late 1938, after the November Pogrom ("Kristallnacht"), Vera left Berlin with the Kindertransport and reached England. Alfred moved to the Netherlands a few months later, and joined the "Hechalutz" movement's large Hachsharah (pioneer training) farm, Werkdorp in Wieringermeer, the Netherlands. He gained his nickname, "Zippi", while at Hachsharah in Germany, before moving to the Netherlands. His parents stayed in Berlin.
Paula Kaufman was born in 1920 in Poland, and immigrated to Vienna with her parents Nachum and Teresa when she was two months old. Her brother Aryeh was born in Vienna. Nachum was the manager of an alcoholic drinks factory, and the family maintained a traditional Jewish lifestyle with Zionist leanings. After the November Pogrom (Kristallnacht), the Kaufmans sought a way to leave Vienna. Paula, a member of the Zionist youth movement "Blauweiss" left to join the Werkdorp Hachsharah farm in the Netherlands. Her father, mother and brother moved to relatives in different parts of Poland.
The Netherlands was occupied by the Germans in May 1940, and Werkdorp was closed in August 1941. Most of the members had already moved to Amsterdam in March, including Zippi and Paula, who worked for the "Joodse Raad", Zippi as a carpenter and Paula as a nurse in the Jewish hospital. Both joined the "Hechalutz"'s underground activities, initially in the Netherlands, and afterwards in France, and were part of a group of Zionist youth, many of them refugees from Germany, who worked to rescue Jews and sought ways to smuggle them to safety in Switzerland and Spain, in preparation for bringing them to Eretz Israel (Mandatory Palestine). In the Netherlands, Zippi kept in contact with his parents via letters. In October 1943, armed with forged ID papers and posing as a Dutch laborer working in France by order of the Germans, Zippi left the Netherlands. In January 1944, Paula left the Netherlands and reached France too.
In France, Zippi and Paula worked with a group of the Dutch resistance that cooperated with the AJ. Zippi was active in Italy and Belgium, locating Jews and providing them with false papers. He was sent to Paris to continue his underground work, but a few days after he arrived, he was given away and caught in a Paris hotel in April 1944, together with other members of the Dutch resistance, including Kurt Reilinger ("Nano"). Paula took on an assumed identity and found work in the Gestapo offices in Paris. She succeeded in passing on information and Gestapo documents to the French resistance, British intelligence, and her comrades in the Dutch resistance. She managed to smuggle out the blueprints of the Gestapo's underground bunker in Paris, and of the landing strip of the V1, lists of expired documents and German ID papers. On 17 July 1944, members of the French resistance were caught after being denounced by a double agent. In the following days, members of the Dutch resistance were also arrested, including Paula Kaufman and Max Windmiller ("Cor"). The detainees suffered interrogation and torture in the Gestapo cellars in Paris, and in August, they were interned in Drancy.
On 17 August 1944, 51 Jews, including the underground activists caught in Paris, were taken from Drancy and put on a German evacuation train. They were placed in a separate car and locked inside. A short time after they departed, the train stopped, because the lines had been sabotaged by the French resistance. The train stayed parked overnight in the Paris suburbs. The next day, the train departed again – and again halted: it entered a tunnel in order to shelter from Allied bombing, and stayed there an entire day. During the journey, the train cars were switched around, and the car with the 51 Jews was placed last. In front of them were some 50 German policemen. Zippi relates:
The French resistance wanted to prevent the train's departure, and they bombed the railway tracks. That was on the fourth day… We were about 20 km from Paris. From the first days, we considered escaping the train, and made arrangements after we figured out the method and saw how it could be done. Ours was the last train car. The police were in the car in front of us… We opened one side, from the rear section of the car, and wanted to jump out in order. We held a lottery. I got number 23, so every five minutes, somebody jumped, until we reached number 19. The escape was halted because the railway tracks had been bombed, the train came to a standstill and the Germans went outside for a few hours. They entered our car afterwards to check on us, and discovered that people were missing."
Those who had jumped from the train were members of the French-Jewish resistance, and one from the Dutch group. Paula Kaufman-Welt claimed in her testimony that all of them decided at some point not to jump, in order not to endanger the others. According to her, the members of the French group changed their minds, jumped and left them to face the wrath of the Germans. "If the train had kept moving for just another 15 minutes," wrote Kurt Reilinger in May 1945, "The whole car would have been empty." (Hans Schippers, Westerweel Group: Non-Conformist Resistance Against Nazi Germany, p. 197)
Zippy relates:
They [the German policemen] conferred with each other, and presumably decided to execute all of us... They threw us all off the train, took all our belongings... And we saw them start to dig… They set up a machine-gun… We were outside. The German [policemen] were 50 and we were 15 boys… Luftwaffe soldiers also came and they asked what was going on, and after a while, a high-ranking German officer appeared… There were cannons on the train… Heavy equipment... He led them to understand that he was the commander of the train, and that nothing could happen on the train without his knowledge… and in the end they put us back into the car."
The evacuation train reached Buchenwald. The men were taken off the train, and after some two weeks in the camp, the Dutch group members were distributed amongst different camps. Paula was transferred to several prisons, and then to Auschwitz. About half the Dutch group members deported from Drancy were murdered by liberation. Zippi and Paula survived.
After the war, Zippi discovered that his parents, Betty and Max Frenkel, had been murdered: on 12 January 1943, they were deported from Berlin to Terezin, and then sent to Auschwitz on 9 October 1944. Paula's father, Nachum Kaufman, was also murdered. Her mother and brother survived in Siberia, deep in the Soviet Union.
In 1946, Zippi immigrated to Eretz Israel (Mandatory Palestine) illegally on the Ma'apilim ship "Tel Hai", and reached Kibbutz Hazorea, where he met Nurit, who had survived the Holocaust in hiding in the Netherlands. They got married and were amongst the founders of Kibbutz Yakum in the Sharon. They had two sons and a daughter. Paula Kaufman immigrated to Eretz Israel in 1947. She married Yosef Welt, a member of the Jewish Brigade from Vienna, in 1952, and they had a son and a daughter.
In 1955, Zippi submitted Pages of Testimony to Yad Vashem in memory of his parents, Betty and Max Frenkel, and other relatives. In 1956, Paula Welt submitted a Page of Testimony in memory of her father, Nachum.
![Kurt Reilinger ("Nano") – activist in the Dutch-Jewish underground in the Netherlands and France.](https://www.yadvashem.org/sites/default/files/01_654.jpg "Kurt Reilinger ("Nano") – activist in the Dutch-Jewish underground in the Netherlands and France.")
![Max Windmiller ("Cor") – activist in the Dutch-Jewish underground in the Netherlands and France.](https://www.yadvashem.org/sites/default/files/02_557.jpg "Max Windmiller ("Cor") – activist in the Dutch-Jewish underground in the Netherlands and France.")
![Ernst Hirsch ("Willy") - activist in the Dutch-Jewish underground in the Netherlands and France.](https://www.yadvashem.org/sites/default/files/04_372.jpg "Ernst Hirsch ("Willy") - activist in the Dutch-Jewish underground in the Netherlands and France.")
![Werkdorp "Hachsharah" in Wieringermeer, the Netherlands](https://www.yadvashem.org/sites/default/files/06_227.jpg "Werkdorp "Hachsharah" in Wieringermeer, the Netherlands")
![Alfred Frenkel ("Zippi"). The Netherlands, 1941](https://www.yadvashem.org/sites/default/files/05_286.jpg "Alfred Frenkel ("Zippi"). The Netherlands, 1941")
