A shocking slap—the last desperate act of a mother—may have saved Rachel Jedinak’s life.
Eight-year-old Rachel, her sister Louise, 13, and her mother, Chana, were arrested in Paris this week in 1942. On orders from the German authorities, French police arrested some 13,000 Jewish men, women, and children.
As Rachel, Louise, and their mother waited in a holding area, Chana saw an opportunity for escape. She ordered Rachel and her sister to leave through an exit.
“I don’t want to leave you,” cried Rachel, refusing.
For the first time in her life, Chana slapped Rachel—willing her to escape.
“We had to grow up quickly,” Rachel said decades later when she had come to understand the sacrifice her mother made in that painful parting. “We were no longer children.”
With the help of police officers who looked the other way, the girls fled.
The Vél d’Hiv roundup was the largest roundup of Jews in France during the Holocaust. It was named for the massive indoor sports arena, known as the Vélodrome d’Hiver, which was used to hold many of the Jewish prisoners. Most of those arrested were immigrants and not French citizens.
Chana, a Polish Jewish immigrant, was later sent to the Drancy internment camp and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau on July 29, 1942.
Though Rachel and her sister survived the Holocaust, their parents did not.
Rachel recovered some family photos and is especially grateful for those of her parents, “without which, I would have forgotten their faces.”