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November 26, 2004/Kislev 13 5765, Vol. 57, No. 13
Holocaust survivors fete French town
PHILIP CARMEL
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
PARIS - When Ida Rozenberg-Apeloig received a book about the activities of the French Resistance in war- time France, her childhood memories of Chateaumeillant came flooding back.
Rozenberg-Apeloig received the book in the summer of 2003 and soon recognized that many of the people cited in the work were associates of her father - fellow members of the resistance who were active in the Cher region of central France during the Nazi occupation.
The book, "Avant l'oublie, Resistance," or "Before We Forget, Resistance," led to the formation of a group of survivors who decided that the time had come to honor the village of Chateaumeillant, where more than 100 Jews lived throughout World War II.
The author had died some years ago, but his son, Jean Claude Sandrier, assisted Rozenberg-Apeloig in gaining access to the region's archives from the wartime period as well as opening up initial links with the Chateaumeillant local council.
Sandrier said for five years, no one denounced the Jews to the authorities. "It just needed one person and there would have been a massacre," he said.
Between 1939 and 1944, Chateaumeillant's 2,500 inhabitants took the Jews in, and, by a mixture of passive and active resistance, blocked the German and French collaborationist officials from deporting the Jews.
On Nov. 20, in a ceremony attended by a small group of survivors and their families, a small plaque was placed on a 12th-century church that dominates the village.
The plaque begins with a simple message: It says "Merci."
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