Rachel Jedinak has long remained silent about her life trauma.
Photo: Familienarchiv
This raid on June 16 and 17, 1942 is the largest mass arrest of Jewish people in the history of occupied France. 13,152 people are detained at Vel d’Hiv, a cycling track in Paris. Most are deported to Auschwitz and killed there. This raid is supported by the German occupation authorities, but – like other mass arrests of this kind before and since – it is carried out in the lead by the French police. It is the French institutions themselves that are handing Jews living in France to the knife. And it is also a large part of French society that silently accompanies, applauds or welcomes this aid to the mass extermination of fellow Jews.
Rachel Jedinak survived this arrest, but that is pure coincidence. There are actually two pure coincidences, pure luck. But first things first: Rachel Jedinak, born in 1934, grew up as the daughter of tenderly loving parents. Father and mother emigrated from Poland to France, and Yiddish is spoken at home. The father, Abram Psankiewicz, a gentle, broad guy, tries to do everything right in the new country and volunteers at the start of the war in 1940, even though the authorities have still not granted his naturalization.
In May 1941 he was arrested and then deported. He is murdered in Auschwitz. A year later, as part of the “Rafle du Vel d’Hiv” (arrest and deportation of tens of thousands of French Jews), the mother was also taken to the transition camp in Drancy, and she was later murdered in Auschwitz.
Rachel Jedinak is among those arrested in this Rafle, together with the mother and her sister. Before that, she experienced the gradual degradation of her life, the yellow star she had to wear, the rationing that was supposed to apply to Jews, playmates who no longer wanted to have anything to do with her because she was Jewish; the loss of a deeply loved father.
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When, during the mass arrest, an opportunity arises for the two sisters to escape unnoticed while the mother stays behind to be sent to her death – she knows it well – little Rachel refuses to leave her mother. Her mother then slaps her in the face – the first and only physical punishment Rachel will receive from her parents – whereupon Rachel actually flees. The mother is being held in an interim camp near Paris. Rachel convinces her older sister to take the bus out so that she can at least see her beloved mother again through binoculars; until the mother is deported to Auschwitz with convoy number 12.
The sisters, who now live with their grandparents, are far from safe; they are even arrested in a later raid on February 11, 1943. In the police station that was supposed to be the next stop for their extermination, there is one at the entrance Woman looks at her and screams that the police are now also attacking children. A crowd is gathering and is threatening to storm the station: so, to calm the situation, a French police officer says to Rachel Jedinak and her sister: “Fichez le camps.” These three words most likely saved both their lives. “Fichez le camps” in German means something like: “Haut off,” and literally translated it would mean: “Get out of the camp.”
Even then, the two of them are not safe. They are housed in a home for Jewish orphans, and whenever any authority cannot meet the prescribed quotas for their murder transports, they come and pick their victims from among these girls. Later, Rachel and her sister flee the accommodation for this reason; a cousin gets them false papers. Rachel is adopted by a French family; Until the mother finds out by chance that her foster child is Jewish and then continually threatens to denounce her. Only the liberation of France by the Americans, British and Canadians released them from the immediate danger of murder.
Rachel Jedinak will remain silent for years afterward about what happened to her in her childhood; Even when her daughter accuses her of being mean because all the other children have grandparents and she doesn’t, she remains silent. Only when her grandson starts asking questions does she begin to speak. She goes to schools, gives lectures and writes the book “We were just children” to bear witness to what good people had to suffer in a cruel world.
The fact that movements like the BSW want to restrict family reunification seems even more absurd and inhumane than before due to this narrative.
In this book, Rachel Jedinak never leaves the perspective of the child who is hurt but knows she is loved. The touching and moving thing about this book is actually that the senseless hatred and desire for destruction of the Germans and French did not make her forget the love her parents gave her. The message of this slim book – which does not want to convey any morals, just tell it – is precisely this: love sustains people, it is never in vain. Rachel Jedinak brings this message with a purity and clarity that is precisely why it is affecting.
And must be affected. Because of course this slim volume points beyond itself and also raises the question of what we, the survivors, may have learned from it. The fact that movements that now nominally call themselves left-wing like the BSW want to restrict family reunification seems even more absurd and inhumane than was the case before, given this narrative; This small, narrow book also reminds us that the basic right to asylum has recently been undermined to such an extent that it can no longer be used as a right, but can be accepted as crumbs, and that this type of erosion of a human right also de facto kills people.
The fact that populists from Wagenknecht to Söder and Merz and the FDP to the AfD want to tear families apart in order to make Germany less attractive to foreigners makes this country alien to all humanity. They will force people to slap their own child in order to save them from the fate of having a loving mother. It is wrong to believe that “Never again is now” only protects foreign bodies, Jews, asylum seekers, strangers: it protects one’s own ability to be human. This slim book also tells about that.
Rachel Jedinak: We were just children, Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, 96 pages, hardcover, €18.
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