2 - Narrating liberation

Summary

Cramped on tiny wooden school-room chairs in one of the two remaining rooms belonging to the Union des Juifs pour la Résistance et l'Entr'aide (UJRE), we came, in the summer of 1996, to honour the memory of a former resister. In its post-war heyday, the clinic, newspaper printing and distribution, meeting rooms and orphans' administration centre took over the entirety of what, fifty years later, had become a crumbling three-storey building not far from the Gare de l'Est in Paris. Early in 1943, this communist affiliated, Jewish resistance organization based in Paris, brought together a number of Jewish clandestine groupings under a single umbrella, the better to draw all Jews, immigrant and French-born, into the resistance, and to represent Jews in France once the occupation was over. After liberation, its Commission Centrale de l'Enfance, like the Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants, ran a number of orphanages for some of the thousands of children its members, largely women, had helped to hide during the occupation and whose parents had been deported. It continued to publish Droit et liberté, the clandestine newspaper that had appeared during the occupation, as well as La Presse nouvelle and its Yiddish version, Di Naïe Presse, and provide medical assistance. Former resisters still found a home there, and a hundred or so gathered to pay their last respects to the Polish-born resister and lifelong activist Perela Traler.