Uncounted Victim. Yael Eylat-Tanaka

the cadets from St. Cyr and Le Prytanée military academies, donning their best uniforms, flaunted their disdain and paraded on the city’s boulevards where the German Commandantur had its headquarters. They sang patriotic songs, such as,

      Vous avez eu l’Alsace et la Lorraine

      Mais malgré tout nous resterons Français

      Vous avez eu l’Alsace et la Lorraine

      Mais notre coeur vous ne l’aurez jamais.

      You got Alsace and Lorraine

      But nevertheless we’ll remain French

      You got Alsace and Lorraine

      But our hearts you’ll never get.

      Amazingly, there were no fearsome reprisals or punishments aside from forbidding the cadets from leaving their barracks for a month. There was great joy, as the reprisals could have been extremely severe.

      Among the people who succeeded in crossing the demarcation line, one of them stands out in my mind: He was a Hungarian Jew, Mr. Spitzer, who had been living in Paris and was now trying to survive in the unoccupied zone.

      He worked as a “plongeur” (dish washer) at a restaurant and used to come to our home for some companionship. In his broken French he told us that one day, as he was coming home from work, he saw his wife and children being taken away in a truck by the Germans. He knew that he was helpless and couldn’t do anything to save them. I was crying and I remember my father saying “Tu vois, tu as fait pleurer my fille.” (You see, you made my daughter cry).

      His was hardly an isolated story in those days. We all feared for our lives. We all feared deportation, and worse.