Tag #123165 - Interview #90453 (Nesim Alkabes)

During the second world war when the Germans invaded France, they could not touch my sister when she said “I am a Turkish citizen”. The Nazi hunters were after Jews like everywhere else in the world. The staff of the police station where my sister lived would learn that the Germans were coming to look, beforehand, and warned all the Jews. Because my brother-in-law Henri was neither Turkish nor French nationality, he would escape to the nearest villages when he heard. He would hide for a few days and then return home. My sister’s store was open for business and she would earn some money. Her husband would come whenever he could, shower, eat, take some money, and when he got news, he would take the train and go hide in the nearby villages. This continued  for 4 years. Only once when he was at the train station, just as he was boarding the train two Germans noticed him. When they started asking: “Stop, who are you? What are you?”, my brother-in-law who had been an atheist until that day, prayed for the first time:
“Please God, save me”  One of the Germans took pity on him and can you imagine that he said: “Let him go, maybe he has a child”.

My brother-in-law boarded the train right in front of the Germans and descended at the  Gare St. Lazare. He went to the synagogue there, took lessons of Torah and Hebrew from the rabbis and as if this were not enough, started fasting 5 days a week. For a long time he only ate on Tuesdays and the Sabbath. He took a vow that he would live this way because G-d had saved him from going to the camps and he followed it. He became the volunteer custodian of this synagogue.

During his escapades, he became a member of French Underground Resistance, he never fought the Germans, but he gave blood 7 times to injured French soldiers. When the French government became aware of this, they said: “From now on you are a French national” and gave him his French passport.