Photos et lettres des Philippines, de France et d'ailleurs

(1)Title off a Yiddish folk song

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0AAsl20VeY&feature=related

(My mother, A Yiddish Mame)

August is really nice and calm in the Paris region and we can drive without the usual traffic jams so I agreed when my wife suggested me to go and meditate at my mother's grave in Pantin and then visit my sister in the 20th district of Paris.
My mother rest in the Jewish cemetery of Pantin and this is a long story that began on 8 October 1883 with the birth of my grandfather Ichapsa (Sebastian) Rabinovitch in Kishinev in Bessarabia then a Russian province and now shared between the Moldovia and the Ukraine.
He took refuge in France after the terrible pogroms of Kishinev that the Jews suffered in 1903 and 1905.

His brother meanwhile went to Palestine to join all these immigrants from Eastern Europe driven by pogroms as well as those of Western Europe shocked by the Dreyfus affair. It is an Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl who in the wake of the Dreyfus trial, established the Zionist movement at the Basel Congress in 1897 advocating the creation of a permanent shelter for the Jewish people in Palestine then an Ottoman province.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Herzl

It is through my mother that I know some bits of what was the life of my grandfather. Austere, scholar, philosopher and atheist although the son of a Rabbi, he married a Polish woman who gave him a daughter they raised in ignorance of the Jewish religion.
After the birth of my mother in 1911, they went too in Israel but perhaps put off by the hard life of the pioneers of the time, they returned to France in 1914 at the declaration of the First World War.
He created in the Paris suburbs a factory that made parts for the new born aircraft industry. It would also be according to my mother the inventor of the scouring pad made of iron wool. I have done some research on Internet but I found nothing to corroborate these assertions.
My grandmother died at the age of 36 leaving my grandfather in the greatest distress. He lost most of its business and wealth and my mother was left in the custody of her maternal grandparents at the age of 16.
She held many jobs and they tried to marry her several times to good Jewish suitors but my father who came to Paris for work from his native province won his heart though not Jewish.
They had first my sister Huguette in 1933 and then my brother Gilbert in 1934. My father had them baptized as Catholics without any objection from my mother.
He was first a bakery worker until they finally had their own business and all went for the best for them until the declaration of the Second World War.

(My parents'bakery in 1938. My mother holds the hands of her kids Huguette and Gilbert. My father is at the entrance)

My father was recalled in the Navy and assigned in Cherbourg on a minesweeper boat.

(My parents in Cherbourg in 1940)

Later he took part in the debacle of Dunkirk and was wounded in the leg before being evacuated to England where he remained for some time before returning to France according to the terms of the armistice of June 1940.
On the way back on board of the vessel the Meknes and although all lights were on the ship was sunk by the German Navy and my father with several broken ribs remained twelve hours in the water clinging to a piece of wood before being rescued by a British cruiser. He was lucky because out 1500 men aboard, 800 perished. This time he stayed over a year in Britain before returning to France in conditions which are still unknown to me.
During this time the Nazis occupied France except for a part of the territory called the "Free France" left to Marshal Petain and his government of Vichy.
The laws against the Jews soon were enforced with the requirement to wear the yellow star. My mother though unaware of the fate that awaited his co-religionists still refused to wear it and this added to her French married name probably saved her from the worst.
During the raid of the Winter Velodrome on 16 and 17 July 1942, 12 884 men, women and children were arrested, transported to Drancy and then deported to Auschwitz where they were exterminated. They represented a quarter of the 42 000 Jews of France sent to the death camps and only 881 returned alive.
Shortly after that my grandfather came to visit my mother with his yellow star on his chest and said that Paris was no longer safe for them and he proposed her to accompany him in Free France, in Lyon. She refused preferring to wait for her husband in Paris with her two children.
She never again heard of him and after the war she did some research but in vain.
I was born in December 1944, her third child, then my brother Guy in 1946 and the fifth Joel in 1952. All baptized Catholics according to the wish of our father, she was often called upon by priests to renounce a religion she wasn't practicing and of which she knew little or nothing but which nevertheless could have cost her  life during the war.  She always refused to convert and to abjure the faith of her parents.
After many financial setbacks, my father died in 1962 and she remained alone with her last 3 children. Then I gave up my studies to start working in a factory followed two years later by my younger brother.
Time passes quickly and our lives as well and my mother grew older and often repeated that after her death she wanted to be buried in the tradition of his ancestors.
She passed away in October 1999 and her children respected her will. She was buried in the Jewish tradition with the assistance of a rabbi.
Last year in 2008, a brother told me that one of his daughters had traced our grandfather Rabinovitch while visiting the memorial of the Shoah in Paris.

Then I went on their website and I could verify what my goddaughter had said with my own eyes.
Arrested at Lyon he left the Drancy camp for Auschwitz on 31 July 1944 when my mother carried me in her womb for 5 months already.
Paris was liberated 25 days later, on 25 August 1944 but it was too late for this Russian immigrant who had fled the Russian pogroms to finish in a Nazi extermination camp.
His name is engraved on the Wall of Names in the Memorial of the Shoah in Paris, as Sébastien Rabinowitch born on 08/10/1883 in Kichineff deported by convoy No. 77 from Drancy on 31/07/1944.
Now we know ...

(His name is the last at the bottom)

(The official receipt of his belongings at the Drancy Camp)

Only one of his five grandchildren joined the Jewish religion by marrying a Jewish Sephardic girl. As for me I'm genetically half French and half Jewish-Slavic, a baptized Catholic but also because I was born of a Jewish mother, a Jew. I also married a Filipina with a quarter of Spanish blood and my 2 children are a mixture of all this.  I hope it can help to stand a step back in this world of madness.