Terwilliger, Paulette_1993/08/11, Oral History, August 11, 1993

Terwilliger, Paulette _Oral History 1993

Interviewee: Paulette Terwilliger Interviewer: Charlotte Berman Interview Location: West Hartford, CT Interview Date: 1993/8/11 Interview Audio Location: ? Transcription By: Janet Poitras

CB = Charlotte Berman PT = Paulette Terwilliger

CB: of Greater Hartford and today is my pleasure and honor to interview Mrs. Terwilliger of West Hartford who was a “hidden child” during World War II. It is my pleasure to be speaking with Mrs. Paulette Terwilliger in her West Hartford home. She will tell us about how traumatic time and those of her family in her home city and region in France. Could you please tell us Paulette, if I may call you Paulette

PT: Yes.

CB: Tell please about what were the names of your parents, where were you born and what was it like just before the Nazis came to power.

PT: All right. I was born in Paris, France on July 21st, 1942 which was the height of the war and the hardest time for Jews because at that time most of them could not escape death camps. My parents’ names, my father’s name is Max Forst and my mother’s name is Rose Forst and her maiden name was Kiquier.

CB: Could you spell Forst?

PT: Forst is F-o-r-s-t.

CB: Forst. Okay.

PT: (Chuckling) Yes. It’s an Austrian name. Part of Austria where my father was born later became part of Poland.

CB: I see. Tell us a little, Paulette, What did your parents do in Paris?

PT: My mother was a young woman whose parents came from Poland and lived in Paris. My grandfather was a rabbi and they owned a restaurant in Paris, a Jewish restaurant.

CB: Do you know the name of thee restaurant, by any chance?

PT: I don’t know! That’s a good question. I should ask. I should find out. And my father emigrated to France on his own. His parents were still in Poland and he was studying dentistry at the time, just before the war.

CB: now what year were you born? Can you tell us?

PT: I was born in 1942.

CB: Tell us what happened before that, just before your birth.

PT: I think on July 17th there was a gathering of the Jews in what is called, in Paris, Le Vell d’Ives, which is actually a sports arena. And they gathered all the Jews in Paris to send them to a place where from there they would go to concentration camps. But at that time my mother was already in the hospital having me.

CB: I see. And your father was sent to a local French jail?

PT: Yes. During the war things were very bad f or the Jews. They could not find any job so the French Underground had provided Jews with documents that said they were Christians. And the French they were very bureaucratic, they still are to this day but at that time particularly and would readily ask people for papers. They asked one day my father and grandfather for their papers and realized that they had false identification papers and arrested them and put them into a French jail.

CB: Um, hmm. They were just whisked away. Did your mother know what was going on at the time?

PT: My mother found out, yes, they were able to contact the family and tell them where they were. That’s when they found out that they were in jail.

CB: And shortly after you were born, is that right?

PT: I was born a few months after that. My father and grandfather were in jail already a few months. And when I was born, when my mother went into what was then and I think still is the Rothchild Hospital in Paris. My grandmother and my uncle who was 17 came to visit her once and after that never showed up again. So she knew something must have been wrong because for her mother not to come and this was her first grandchild my mother knew for sure that something was wrong.

CB: Mm, hmm. Did she find out what happened to her mother subsequently?

PT: She didn’t find out until she came out of the hospital and went to the apartment where they used to live and found no one there. She went to see the concierge, the woman who as Super in the building, and she said that my mother and her two brothers, my uncles, had been taken away by the Gestapo.

CB: I’m thinking here’s a young woman with a brand new baby, her mother’s gone, her brothers are gone, her husband’s gone, her father-in-law’s gone. What did she do?

PT: There was nowhere for her to go. She was twenty-one years old at that time and she always tell the story of how she went to a park holding and just sitting there not really knowing what to do. She contacted a friend with whom she was able to stay for a few days. During that time she found out that one of my father’s second cousins was hiding in the French countryside, contacted this woman and found that that there were villagers, farmers, who were willing to take in Jews. This is how we made, we took a train, my mother took me on a train, and we made it to a place that is still to this day called Pradines. It’s not far from Toulouse in the Pyrenees. And this is where we hid.

From there she was able to contact my father in jail.

CB: Unbelievable.

PT: And my father had a friend who worked in the kitchen in jail. The friend got him to work in the kitchen and they both escaped under a garbage truck.

CB: Really? Amazing.

PT: The first time they got caught. The second time they were able to escape and my father joined my mother in Pradines where a wonderful Catholic woman in her seventies, never been married, was hiding us. She hid us for the next two years.

CB: Do you remember her name?

PT: Her name was Madame Adeline and she was very a very petite, very small woman. She was a very strong woman. She had a very large farm, who worked a lot, who worked very hard, and we were able to stay there. There were times that we just couldn’t stay there, we had to hide in the woods because every so often the Nazis would come and do searches. And they figured out that there was some Jews being hid in the village. Every so often we just couldn’t stay there. Whenever we heard that the Nazis were coming we had to hide in the woods.

CB: Paulette, I take it that not all of the farmers in Pradines were taking Jews in or were enchanted with the safety of the Jews. How did those wonderful people who were hiding them pull it off?

PT: That’s a very good question because these people took tremendous chances. They put their life on the line because they knew they would be caught that they would just be killed, probably on the spot. It was not unusual for the Nazis to make an example of people who were hiding the Jews. They would gather people on the Place, which was an area of the village.

CB: The center.

PT: The center. And it was not so unusual that they were hung. They were made an example so for Madame Adeline to have hidden us it was an incredible thing for her to do, and for people like her. To have hidden the Jews was an incredible thing for them.

CB: Absolutely. So how long did you and your mother, with trips into the woods when the Nazi sweep search came, after how long did you stay with Madame Adeline?

PT: We stayed about two and-a-half years. At the end of that time, at the end of two-and-a-half years, it became, during that time it became increasingly difficult for them to keep on going into the woods particularly during the cold months.

CB: Yes.

PT: With a child.

CB: Yes.

PT: So they did, during that time, what they say is the hardest thing for them to do, they placed me in an orphanage. I think the most difficult thing was you weren’t always sure you were ever going to see your child again.

CB: Of course, of course.

PT: But at least you knew that the child would be fairly safe.

CB: Where, where Paulette, was this orphanage? Where was it?

PT: The orphanage was in the surroundings of Pradines. My parents did not want me to go too far. And because it was the hardest thing for them, they kept in pretty close contact even when I was in the orphanage. They would, even taking chances, they would come and see me through the window, they would observe me to see that I was still there, that I was okay.

CB: Yes.

PT: And I was there for about six months. Which was rather a short time because many children were there for

CB: For years. What happened after six months?

PT: After six months it was the end of the war and at that time we went back to Paris.

CB: The family was reunited?

PT: Yes. But my grandmother and my grandfather, my uncles all

CB: Perished.

PT: Perished in the concentration camps.

CB: Terrible. And when you went back to Paris, you lived there, the agencies helped to resettle you or your father found work? Was he able to provide for you and so on, and so forth?

PT: No. At that time we were pretty much on our own. The agencies came into play a little later but there were so many people to be helped. And when we came back to Paris the people my mother found happily were three sisters survived. But my mother was the eldest and we all lived together, and there wasn’t much to be had. No job. My father couldn’t find a job. It was very difficult at that time. We really didn’t have anything. We had to really rebuild a whole life.

CB: Of course.

PT: My father had a sister in South America and after a year in Paris in which we saw that we just couldn’t survive we went to South America.

CB: Which country in South America?

PT: In Montevideo.

CB: Yes. And who was there again?

PT: My aunt, my father’s sister. And she was married.

CB: Yes.

PT: And they had a business so my father worked there. But my mother still had her three sisters in Paris and she missed them. They were the only surviving relatives she had.

CB: Um, hmm, um, hmm.

PT: So we went back to Paris.

CB: You and she, or you and Dad and she?

PT: The three of us, my father, my mother, and myself.

CB: But by this time were things economically a little easier, would you say, or not?

PT: I think they were not but by this time there were more, people got more together, people were coming back and finding each other. There was more of a network of friends helping each other

CB: Yes.

PT: And little by little, for example, my father’s job, his first job, was making matzos in a factory. That was his first job. Going from dentistry to (laughing)

CB: Something you can break your teeth on, yeah. Now, Paulette, your memories of this, are they through your mother’s words or at this tender age, did you really remember when you were at the convent?

PT: I don’t remember that time. I don’t remember the time when we were hiding. My earliest memories, and even then I just have some glimpses of the images, were after the war when we came back to Paris. I remember times when we were in South America and I certainly remember when we came back to Paris because I was five years old by then. So what I know from hiding is really what I learned from my parents.

CB: You returned to Paris, it was 1946, ’45, was it around then?

PT: It was 1946.

CB: And, you were maybe you were in kindergarten, do you remember any anti-Semitism around you? What was it like?

PT: At the time I didn’t call it, I didn’t know what it was, I was so young, I just remember that the Jewish kids stuck together. Maybe they were because of the experiences that we had gone through, we seemed to gravitate toward each other. I don’t remember any act of anti-Semitism but I just remember not being able to say I was going to the synagogue, I remember hesitating to say that I was Jewish. The less we talked about it the better off we were.

CB: Um, hmm.

PT: It was unspoken. It was just a sense, I think. I don’t remember someone saying don’t say you’re Jewish, I just remember thinking it was better if people don’t know that I’m Jewish.

CB: And very understandably I’m sure that you took that in at your mother’s breast, literally, and all the times subsequently. Can you leave our listeners, Paulette, with any finishing thoughts that you want to project to them, please.

PT: Yes. By doing this interview, by talking to you Charlotte, and by telling my story, I am very much hoping that we will never forget this period of time which was so shameful to humanity. I am right now feeling that it is a very pressing thing for me to talk about this because my mother is getting very old, I no longer have my father. And so I am the next generation, and I feel it is part of me that is important, extremely important, for me to share this time in my life.

CB: And I understand that you’re sharing it with students in this area, could you tell a bit about that, please?

PT: Yes. I am a teacher, and I think it’s very important for the generations to come to know about the Holocaust, to know what happened during that time. I find during my talk that there are some children who are not aware of what happened, they are not sure even what the holocaust means, even the word.

CB: How old are those children?

PT: Well, I teach at the junior high level so these children are between eleven and fourteen. The more I’m finding that out, the more I find it, it’s extremely important for me to share this story.

CB: Absolutely. Thank you, Paulette Terwilliger, and we will put this in our collection at the permanent exhibit we have on Holocaust survivors, and we from the Jewish community and the community at large, thank you very much.