Sometimes all it takes to save a life is for another person to act forcefully on their behalf.

Here’s a Dutch-Paris story that I only recently learned from the grandchild of the man concerned.  The man’s great-grandchild was doing a little family research and asked me a question, which led to me asking them quite a lot more questions.

In 1942 the French police rounded up most Jews in Paris for deportation to Auschwitz.   During that time, a 12 year old girl went to visit her best friend.  The concierge of her friend’s building told the girl that her friend’s family had been arrested for being Jewish and that her friend and her brother were at an orphanage of sorts awaiting deportation.

The girl went to this orphanage and demanded to see her friend.  But the people in charge would not deal with a child.  So the girl went home and told her father what had happened.  Her father owned a café and a garage and was a leader in the neighborhood.  In fact, he was the leader of a resistance group in the arrondissement, although it’s not clear when he started that group.   The father went right out to that orphanage and demanded custody of his daughter’s friend.  Was this part of official policy?   Could anyone take responsibility for a Jewish child in 1942 or did this man have to do some persuading and/or wrangling?   The story doesn’t say.

But the girl herself always said for the next 60 some years of her life that on the day he extracted her from the orphanage, he told her to consider herself as one of his daughters.   She lived with the family until she married and the two girls remained best friends for the rest of their long lives.

For the rest of the war, the two girls did what they could for the resistance.   The father allowed Dutch-Paris to use his café as a meeting place and message center.  He later reported that the person who delivered messages from the café for Dutch-Paris was the Jewish girl and that she did it to avenge her parents.   Her friend delivered food to resisters on the barricades during the liberation of Paris in August 1944.  Neither of them was yet 16 years old.

The Jewish girl’s brother escaped from the orphanage on his own and also survived the war.