In January 1944, Maurice Pelcman sent an illustrated card from Paris to his friend Evelyn Wittenberg, in southern France with her mother, on the occasion of her tenth birthday. One month later, Maurice was deported to Auschwitz with his family and murdered. Evelyn survived.
Evelyn Wittenberg (later Edna Biber) was born in 1934 in Paris, the only daughter of Nechama and Yitzhak, both from Poland. Nechama Kuperman was born in Lublin and immigrated to Paris in the early 1930s in the footsteps of her brother, Nathan-Naftali. Yitzhak Wittenberg was born in Siedlice, and emigrated to Eretz Israel (Mandatory Palestine) in 1929. He had various jobs, fell ill and on recovering, moved to France. There, he met Nechama, and they got married. Nechama and Yitzhak opened a workshop in their apartment for the production and sale of hats. Esther and Jacob Pelcman lived in the same apartment building. They, too, had emigrated from Poland, and had four children in Paris: Eva (b. 1925), Simone (b. 1930), Maurice (b. 1934) and Pauline (b. 1941). The two families got to know each other. Evelyn and Maurice became very good friends and went to the same kindergarten. Evelyn relates:
I remember a long table [in the workshop] with a plank in the middle… I remember playing with my little childhood friend, Maurice, under the table, pretending it was a train. I sat down there and he sold me tickets, and vice versa.
Yitzhak and Nechama separated before the war, and Evelyn remained with her mother. In 1940, following the German invasion of France, Nechama and Evelyn fled to a village in Normandy, northern France, together with other relatives, and a few months later, they returned to Paris. After a wave of arrests of Jewish men in the summer of 1941, and their deportation to camps in France, Yitzhak left Paris for southern France, while Evelyn and her mother stayed in Paris. In June 1942, they left their apartment and moved to a hotel. Nechama did not register their new address with the police. During the roundup of the Jews of Paris and the surrounding areas on 16 July 1942 (the Vel D'Hiv roundup), the owner of the hotel hid Nechama and Evelyn in the attic and saved them. They paid smugglers to help them move to Vichy France. The Pelcman family stayed in Paris, and despite the inherent danger, Nechama and Esther kept in touch, writing each other letters.
Nechama settled in Lyon, armed with forged papers. "The forged papers were fine as long as no one [the police] asked to see them…" recalls Evelyn. "At every step, they demanded papers… The police would conduct sweeps of every train, every tram and every place on the streets. My mother, with her French [assumed] name… When they asked her a question, as soon as she opened her mouth, with her foreign accent, that was in itself a big problem, and we were terrified that she would be caught." Evelyn was sent to a monastery until Nechama could organize everything. Nechama decided to leave Lyon, where there were frequent police checks, and moved to an isolated house in neighboring Villeurbanne. She wrote to Esther Pelcman, who sent her materials and equipment from the apartment in Paris so that she could make hats there. Thus, Nechama was able to eke out a meager living making hats and selling them. Evelyn left the monastery and was reunited with her mother. She went to the Catholic school in Villeurbanne, where she was bullied by her classmates, who suspected her of being Jewish. In order to avoid being caught by the authorities, Nechama would send 8-and-a-half-year-old Evelyn alone on the tram to central Lyon with the completed hats, and the child would return with materials to make new ones. "Little girls don't have ID cards, and no one would ask me for papers," said Evelyn. Medical tests were carried out at her school, and Evelyn was found to have a shadow on her lung. She was sent to the French Alps to recuperate, and Nechama was glad that her daughter was somewhere safe. At the height of winter, Evelyn reached a strict Catholic family in a small village in the Haute-Savoie district, joining them for daily prayers and church on Sundays. Four months later she returned to Villeurbanne.
In January 1944, Maurice Pelcman sent a postcard from Paris, illustrated with a drawing of a boy and a girl. On the reverse, he wrote a birthday greeting to his friend Evelyn:
On your tenth birthday, I wish you happy birthday, and hope that next year I will be able to send you birthday greetings from closer by. Your little friend, Maurice.
Nechama and Evelyn stayed in Villeurbanne until liberation. During this time, they knew nothing of Yitzhak's fate, or that of Nechama's brother Nathan, who had been hiding with his family in Paris. After liberation, Nechama and Evelyn returned to Paris and discovered that Yitzhak had survived. On 24 August 1942, Nathan and his wife Paulette-Perl were deported from the Drancy camp to Auschwitz. The Pelcmans suffered a similar fate. Jacob was deported on 18 September 1942. 18 months later, Esther and the children were betrayed and arrested, and deported to Auschwitz on 10 February 1944.
In 1949, Nechama and Evelyn immigrated to Israel, and Evelyn changed her name to Edna. In later years, she said:
My friend Maurice sent me a birthday card in 1944, in which he expressed his hope that we would be able to celebrate together the following year. Who could have imagined that one month later, at the age of ten, he would be sent to the gas chambers and that I would never see him again? Every year, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, I put the touching, yellowing birthday card next to a memorial candle and a bunch of flowers, as a symbol of the tragedy of the Holocaust, and in memory of my friend Maurice.
In 1955, Nechama Wittenberg submitted Pages of Testimony to Yad Vashem in memory of her friend Esther Pelcman and her children, her brother Nathan Kuperman and his wife, all of whom were murdered at Auschwitz, and other relatives. Nathan and Paulette's son, Bernard, survived. In 2016, as part of the national project, "Gathering the Fragments", documents and photographs of the Wittenberg and Pelcman families were donated to Yad Vashem, including the postcard that Maurice sent, and which is displayed here.
