By presenting Madeleine Dreyfus in his brilliant award-winning documentary, Weapons of the Spirit, Pierre Sauvage points to the fact that Jewish people themselves were rescuers of Jews on the plateau Vivarais-Lignon during the Holocaust.
The organization Madeleine Dreyfus worked for, Oeuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE), was founded in Russia in 1912 by a group of young doctors committed to offering poor Jews sanitary protection and health benefits. It moved in 1917 to Berlin where Albert Einstein was its honorary president. In 1933, it moved to Paris and in 1940 to Montpellier where it became the principal Jewish organization concerned with Jewish welfare in internment camps.
Madeleine Dreyfus was one of the OSE Jewish fieldworkers who placed over 100 Jewish children in non-Jewish homes during a thirteen-month period. She was arrested in 1943 and survived Bergen-Belsen. Scholars estimate that OSE saved approximately 6,000 children. During the Occupation of France, 32 OSE staff members lost their lives and 90 OSE children did not survive.
Jews were less than 1% of the French population but were 6% of the formal violent Resistance. Throughout occupied Europe, between 150,000 and 300,000 Jews were rescued. Jewish parents were often the first rescuers of Jewish children, making the anguished choice to separate from their children in hopes of their survival.
Until recently, there have been few attempts to recognize Jewish rescuers of other Jews during the Holocaust. Rescue was another form of resistance, taking forms like hiding in one’s home country, in adjacent forests or crossing borders to safety. Jewish people played an active role throughout occupied Europe in rescuing other Jews.
Even armed resisters like Tuvia Bielski, who with his brothers saved 1,200 Jews in the forests of Belorussia, prioritized rescue over combat, stating ‘To save a Jew is much more important than to kill Germans.’ Future iconography of Jewish resistance should include images of Jewish humanitarian workers saving children from camps and ghettos, and those who helped others cross borders to safety in Switzerland, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey.
The B’nai B’rith World Center in Jerusalem is collecting names and issuing Jewish Rescuer of Jews citations.