Fort Irwin listens to Holocaust survivor during Days of Remembrance observance
ery early on a summer morning in 1942, in a little French town 45 miles north of Paris, a boy not yet five years old, the son of a Jewish couple in their early 30's, saw something he couldn't talk about for the next 60 years.
Leon Malmed was only three when the Germans invaded France in 1940 and bombed Compiègne, a small town where his family lived, about 45 miles north of Paris. His sister, then eight, "…remembers our mother in tears holding our hands, watching, shortly after the air raid, our small apartment building in smoking ruins," said Malmed.
Malmed, the guest speaker at Fort Irwin's annual observance of the Holocaust, sponsored by the National Training Center's Equal Opportunity Office and the Fort Irwin Dental Command, continued: "France surrendered three weeks later….French soldiers [including his father] caught in uniform were taken prisoner. They spent the next five years in prison camps in Germany. Our father, who was able to find civilian clothes, escaped being taken by the Germans and rejoined us in Paris."
The family returned to Compiègne and moved to a third floor apartment at 17 rue Saint Fiacre, to find themselves, their relatives, and friends being shunned and persecuted again, for being Jewish, under the Vichy regime.
It kept getting worse until the infamous Sunday morning of July 19, 1942. At 5 a.m., French policemen knocked at the door and asked my parents to follow them to the police station with no reason given.
"What about our children?" our parents asked hysterically.
The question fell on deaf ears. The Nazis had told the French police to arrest our parents
who were still Polish citizen and they obeyed the enemy orders.
The commotion woke up our neighbors from the floor below. They came up the flight of
stairs to see what the noise was all about, very unusual at 5 a.m. on a Sunday morning.
My father told them that they were being taken to the police station. They did not know
what to do with us.
Monsieur Ribouleau, our 2nd floor neighbor, we hardly knew, said: "Mr. and Mrs. Malmed,
do not worry, we will take care of your children until you return".
These few words saved our lives.
My sister and I were crying. I was hanging on to my mother's skirt.
Little did we know that it would be the last time we would ever see our parents.
My mother was 31 years old. My father was 35. My sister was 10 and I was 4 and a half.
So began our new lives with strangers.
This couple put their lives and the lives of their two sons, René, 20, and Marcel, 17,
in mortal danger for the next three years. For the next 3 years, these wonderful
people continued to pay out of their very small salaries, the rent of our parents'
apartment, certain that they were coming back!
In 1943 and 1944, as the hunt for the last Jewish residents in hiding intensified, one
neighbor in particular kept asking: "Mr. and Mrs. Ribouleau, why are you doing this?
Why are you risking your and your sons' lives?"
Their answer was always: "We promised Mr. and Mrs. Malmed that we would take care
of Rachel and Leon until they return."
Until the war ended 34 months later, the Ribouleau family hid them, sharing their four food rations to feed the two growing children, even as food became scarcer as the war dragged on. The Malmed children narrowly escaped the fate of all other Jews in the town, including that of their 5-year-old cousin, hidden by another French family. Their cousin was taken away and exterminated at Auschwitz, along with 269 other children.
The Malmed children were lucky. Someone spilled coffee on the order sheet that had their names on top, making their address illegible. The driver skipped over their names and went on to the second set of names on the list, giving Malmed and his sister barely enough time to flee before the driver returned.
Malmed ended his remarks by noting that 291,000 died American soldiers and 672,000 were wounded by the war. He continued:
During WWII, 72 million civilians and soldiers including 2,800 catholic priests lost
their lives. Despite the relatively recent events of World War II, too many, on this
beautiful earth, still deny or pretend to deny the Holocaust, a well- documented
historical tragedy.
I am a witness of that catastrophe.
We cannot be silent. Our religious leaders and educators must remind us of the tragic
events of WWII. They must remind us of the catastrophes due to anti-Semitism, racism
and religious hatred that have brought havoc, death and misery for centuries if
not millenniums.
At last, after so many years of silence, I testify with the hope that my children, my
grandchildren, my friends, the audiences I address and the readers of "We survived…
At Last I speak" would prevent repeating the mistakes of the past. I hope that writing,
talking about my personal experience and related events that took place more than
seventy years ago, events that could have annihilated the world, will contribute to
a better world.
Is this a utopian thought? I hope not. The Holocaust must "NEVER BE FORGOTTEN."
Out of the tragedies so many endured, came tremendous heroism and courage from
many people who were never brought up to become heroes. Heroism is not a learned skill."
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