Children of the Holocaust by Paul R. Bartrop & Eve E. Grimm

Author:Paul R. Bartrop & Eve E. Grimm
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO, LLC
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Georges Loinger, in 2014, at the age of 104. Loinger was a leading rescuer of Jewish children in Vichy France during the Holocaust. Orchestrating the rescue activities of other resisters as well as through his own efforts, many hundreds of Jewish children survived the war by being passed across the border and into Switzerland. Born in Alsace in 1910, he lived until December 2018 and managed to impart his testimony on several occasions. (© Claude Truong-Ngoc/Wikimedia Commons)

While teaching, Loinger also became the chief instructor of physical education of the EIF. In 1937 a leading member of French Jewish society, Baron Edouard de Rothschild, brought 125 German Jewish children, aged between 8 and 14 years old, whose parents had been arrested and interned in camps in Germany, and placed them in the Château de la Guette. In this large property, owned by the Rothschilds near Paris, Flore Loinger was given responsibility for supervising the children’s care.

With the defeat of France in 1940, Loinger, serving in the French Army, was imprisoned with his unit and interned at Stalag 7A in Bavaria. Managing to escape with his cousin Marcel Vogel and returning to France by January 1941, after a period of rehabilitation, he saw the operation at the Château de la Guette dissolved in November 1941, with the children then placed in the care of the OSE. Around the same time, he again met with Joseph Weill, who convinced him to become an OSE operative. By January 1943 he had been recruited to organize a means whereby secure border crossings to Switzerland could take place for several hundred Jewish children in and around the town of Annemasse, in Haute-Savoie. Throughout the period 1943–1944, Loinger, serving as a passeur (people mover), managed the successful passage of about 350 children. Some of the ways he was able to achieve these crossings were quite ingenious.

The best-known stories about Georges Loinger’s life as a passeur include his heroism as he helped smuggle Jewish across the French-Swiss border by staging games of football, taking children on hikes, and then assisting them to cross during these activities. However, what is less known is the seriousness with which he undertook his missions. Loinger was to say later that “all the horror and injustice of the war are focused, for me, in that one moment, the departure of children, all these groups of children frightened and saddened by the separation from their families.” As he saw it, the smuggling operations were the most important contribution to combatting Nazi genocide and the destruction of the Jewish people, for it was in the rescue of these children that the Jewish people could survive and recover after the Holocaust.

As a result he became an expert in crossing frontiers, and his efforts, together with the teams of passeurs he assembled (which included his cousin, Marcel Marceau) were overall successful in arranging the passage of convoys of children and youths to Switzerland. Two, however, were intercepted and had tragic outcomes: the stories of Mila Racine and of Marianne Cohn.

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