Solange Lebovitz recounts her experiences at Holocaust Center event
As a child, Lebovitz was hidden in France with a Catholic couple.
At a county fair in France, a young Solange Lebovitz noticed everyone staring at her. A shy girl, she quickly deduced the reason: Her yellow star marking her as Jewish. She took it off and said, “I’m not wearing it anymore.”
Lebovitz told her story through a pre-recorded video and a live talk for a Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh event at Edward Danforth Theatre at Chatham University’s Shadyside campus on Sept. 12.
Her parents, Rosa, née Hershkovitz, and Eizik Dratler, moved from Sighet, Transylvania, to Paris in 1925. Lebovitz was born five years later, one of six children. She was a sickly child and was sent to a preventorium in the mountains in 1938, just before the war began. She spent a year writing letters to her family before being sent back to Paris.
One of her older sisters had married a man from Budapest at the beginning of the war, but he was taken as a prisoner of war, so Lebovitz’s parents sent her to live with Regine in Le Loire Val, a province in France.
A French collaborationist government based in the city of Vichy governed unoccupied France, and in 1940, the government pushed antisemitic legislation similar to Nazi Germany’s.
Lebovitz had to register as Jewish, going to the city of Autun around 25 miles away to be given a yellow star to sew on her sweater.
The French authorities placed thousands of Jews in heinous conditions in French-run detention camps, where at least 3,000 died during the war.
Lebovitz’s sister was arrested but was released quickly because there were no German soldiers at the time. After that, Lebovitz was sent to stay with the Barbiers, an older French couple in Normandy.
The Barbiers had a beautiful house off the main road with a pressoir to make cider. Lebovitz spent more than two years with them until the French liberation.
The Catholic couple sent her to public school and church every Sunday. While she suspected some of the girls at the school or church also were Jewish, the fear of arrest — or the arrest of their caretakers — meant none of them inquired if the others were Jewish.
The director of the school, Lebovitz said, was smart and knew when the Germans were coming, so she sent Lebovitz to supervise the kindergarten class. Lebovitz didn’t fit the German stereotype of what a Jewish person looked like; she had red hair and blue eyes.
Once, she saw the door to the class open and a German soldier looked inside. He saw the small children and looked at Lebovitz, then closed the door and left.
Back in Paris, her family faced hardships. In 1941, Nazis bombed six synagogues and one Jewish prayer house in the city. A year earlier, a German census registered 150,000 Jews in Paris. Jewish people had to register with the police to be given an identity card with a Jewish stamp on it. If they didn’t, they couldn’t get ration tickets to buy food.
Eventually, Jews were arrested. Some of them were transferred to Drancy, a concentration camp where they were held before being sent to other camps.
In 1942, French police held 13,000 Jews in Paris’ Vélodrome d’Hiver sports arena. They were held without food or water before they were deported via Drancy to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Thousands of Jews went into hiding, but nearly 30,000 were deported from Paris during 1942. Only 60,000 Jews remained by mid-1943.
Lebovitz’s family in Paris had split up. Her mother and oldest brother went to Limoges, while another brother and her father stayed in a small apartment in Paris.
One day, a friend warned them they would be arrested; someone denounced them to the police for a monetary reward. Her father and brother climbed out a window onto the roof and then slid down a waterspout into the alley to escape.
Eventually, they took the train to Limoges and reunited with Lebovitz’s mother, moving from hotel to hotel. Her parents ended up convincing a man to let them stay in his apartment, and in return they provided him with food and drinks.
Her parents hid their Jewish identity, instead saying they were refugees from the north where their house had been bombed. One day, the man said they must be Jewish because Lebovitz’s father did not eat pork. Her mother lied, saying he had a bad stomach, but they knew it wasn’t safe to stay, and left.
In August 1944, German forces in Paris surrendered. That same month, Lebovitz remembers standing on the main road and giving cider to convoys of American soldiers, who threw cigarettes and candy back to her.
Her parents sent her brother to find out if she was alive. He walked for almost 25 miles to get to her. In December, her father came to pick her up and took her back to Paris.
All eight members of Lebovitz’s family survived the war, but she lost many members of her extended family, including her 80-year-old grandfather Shimshon Hershkovitz and several of her father’s siblings: Rivka, Malke and Adolphe Dratler.
In 1952, she married Lazar, or Larry, Lebovitz, a Holocaust survivor from Czechoslovakia, and they moved to Pittsburgh.
She had two children, and as they pursued higher education, she decided to get the education she couldn’t during the Holocaust. At 42, she enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh. At 50, she graduated cum laude with a degree in English and French literature.
In 2019, she published “Outrage and Hope,” a book of poetry inspired by her experiences during the Holocaust.
During the event, Emily Loeb, director of programs and education at the Holocaust Center, asked Lebovitz how poetry helped her process what happened to her.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t know,” Lebovitz said. “I’m emotional, I’m a child of the Holocaust period, and to me it just comes naturally, so I cannot really claim credit for it.”
Each piece is a delicate reflection of the turmoil Jewish people endured during the war. “War is a tragedy,” one of her poems begins.
“Victory over evil is euphoric / For an instant, / But the pain and the losses, / The bloodshed, / The crimes / Remain a blot / On the glory of mankind,” the poem ends. PJC
Abigail Hakas is a freelance writer living in Pittsburgh.
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