Arthur Robert

Lang: Briefly, Arthur, I thought we would get some main guideposts in your life to ascertain where and when you moved around the globe. So if we could begin with when exactly you were born and where, and we can move from there.
ROBERT: I was born in 1920 in a little village of Alsace, which is eastern France. My father was a teacher there. A few years after I was born we moved to Paris, where I was educated.

Lang From Paris, then you left the country?
ROBERT: Yes. After being in high school, I went to a Protestant seminary, and then I was ordained a pastor and was sent to a mission field in Madagascar. The field was under control of an American mission, and there I met my wife who was a missionary nurse, an American. We were married there, and then we moved to the States, where I retired after 30 years in Madagascar.

Lang: So you left France in 1955, left Madagascar in 1985, and came to the United States to?
ROBERT: Minneapolis.

Lang: And then moved to Portland.
ROBERT: One year ago.

Lang: OK. Now we’ll go back and try and pick up from your birth. The exact date of your birth?
ROBERT: September 6, 1920.

Lang: And the name of the village you lived in?
ROBERT: La Broque, which is a village of about 300 people.

Lang: Would you mind spelling it?
ROBERT: In two words. La Broque [spells out].

Lang: You mentioned your father was a teacher, in a religious institution?
ROBERT: No, in a government school. Then he moved to Paris in, I think, 1928.

Lang: Brothers and sisters?
ROBERT: I had two sisters.

Lang: When you moved to Paris, you were only six years old?
ROBERT: I should have been about eight years old. I don’t remember exactly.

Lang: Can you tell us a bit about the schooling and the institutions you went to in Paris for your education?
ROBERT: I went to the government school until I was 12 years old. Then at the end of this school we had what is called the lycée, which corresponds about to the high school in America, but we have 13 years of scolarité [schooling]. I think here that would be about 12, if I’m not mistaken. Then after, I went to a seminary for four years.

Lang: Your family was religious?
ROBERT: Yes, as far as I can go, from 1685 — my grandfather, his name was Abraham Robert, and his son was Isaac. They escaped from France to go to Switzerland because of the Catholic persecution of the [sounds like ardigenois?]. They either were killed or sent to the galleys, the military boats of the king; they were there as slaves on that to go and push this big galleon. So instead of going there [inaudible word?], anybody would have done the same thing — escape to Switzerland to avoid death. Then they came back after the French Revolution.

Lang: So the background is Protestant. 
ROBERT: Yes.

Lang: You grew up then in a practicing household?
ROBERT: Oh, yes, a very practicing family. I was raised by my parents very religiously, and that keeps going with our children.

Lang: If you can remember to your early years, or your teen years in Paris, were you aware of — even where you grew up in the mountains — of any Jewish citizens at all?
ROBERT: When I was in school in the lycée, we had classes of 45 students, and I think we had eight or nine Jews in the class. They were brilliant. Practically in the ten first, you always had five or six who were Jews, and in math or in French, they were very, very great. At that time these lycée were expensive. Only the rich people could go there because people had to pay for it. Being the son of a government teacher, I had the right to take a test, and if I passed the test, I was able to go there free.

Lang: Free of charge.
ROBERT: Free of charge.

Lang: You wouldn’t classify your family as rich. You were more …
ROBERT: The teacher was not Ross Perot [laughs]. Teachers were paid decently, but nothing extravagant. They would not have been able to pay for the lycée at that time. Now the lycée is free. But so then we had a good group of Jews who were very, very nice. They had some trouble. There were some stupid guys that were anti-Jew, not many, but sometimes we heard some reflections that were a little bit painful. But practically in school they did not have any trouble.

Lang: Did you interact with them? You would go to their homes?
ROBERT: No, because all these Jews lived in Paris and we lived in the suburbs, so I had no possibility to go to their houses. They were a group, very strong together. They were like all the minorities. Minorities stick together, which is absolutely normal in their place in the world.

Lang: The neighborhood in the suburbs that you lived in, Jews could live there. Were there any Jews in that neighborhood?
ROBERT: I did not know any. I don’t remember seeing any Jew there. I did not pay any attention to that. But my father had a certain number of friends who were Jews. Those who were in the First World War sometimes were invited to their places, and they had nice children.

Lang: So your father fought for France in the war? He was a soldier?
ROBERT: Yes, not only a soldier, but a volunteer for all the big attacks. He was always in the commandos that went to attack in all the circumstances that were difficult and very important. A lot of his friends were killed, but he went through the war without any injuries. He shot a number of — medals. One of them was given to him by King Albert I of Belgium for defending Belgium from the Germans. 

Lang: Do you recall ever, before the war started, your father — he was a teacher, so he obviously was an educated man — discussing at home or with you anything about Jewish history or other Jewish citizenry, or was it just sort of a non-issue?
ROBERT: It was a non-issue. The good friends, we knew that they were Jews, but we did not see a difference, I would say, in our friendship. It was really great.

Lang: I think I’d like to move on to the German invasion of France in 1940. Can you paint a picture of what your first impressions were, maybe what you were doing at the time, and your first recollections? 
ROBERT: When the war started, my father was a teacher in Paris, and he decided to move towards the center of France, in the country, where we had a house where we went for vacations. He got the authorization to be the director of the school in this town because the director there had been mobilized to the army. We were there for a few months and the Germans started invading France. 

Lang: The name of that town, Arthur?
ROBERT: Pouilly-sur-Loire. If you want the name, it’s on the map.

Lang: It would be worthwhile if you want to locate it on the map.
ROBERT: [Papers shuffling.] You can see it from there, or not?

Lang: Do you want me to hold it?
ROBERT: OK. Paris is here. You have the Loire River here, coming from this way to the ocean. Orleans is here. Pouilly-sur-Loire is just here, on the Loire River.

Lang: How do you spell it?
ROBERT: Pouilly-sur-Loire [spells out].

Lang: What does that mean in English? Is there an English translation?
ROBERT: No, that’s Pouilly on the Loire, which is the river, the longest river in France that is a little bit over 1,000 kilometers long.

Lang: So then the whole family moved out?
ROBERT: We moved there. We lived there for a few months, and then the Germans were able to cross a certain number of rivers using sometimes tricks so the bridges would not be blown. For instance, the French troops were going back here, retreating, and then when it was the time to blow the bridge, suddenly they saw some more French saying, “No, no, no. Don’t blow it. There are still some troops there.” These false French were Germans with French uniforms. So they took the bridge without it being blown because those who guarded the bridge, they took them prisoners. There were a lot of tricks like that during the war. 

So then we started hearing the guns, the cannons, day or night, nonstop. It was noisy like a permanent thunder. When we saw that they were rather close, we saw that there was no hope that they would stop, we took our car, put [inaudible?] on the roof like everybody did to avoid being killed from above, and we went on the roads that were one way, everybody going south. Then the Italians decided to enter the war. When they saw that the Germans were winning, Mussolini said, “OK. We are with Hitler.” So these courageous little Italian planes came flying above the refugees and started shooting the cars. We had many people killed around us. When the people were killed, they stayed in the cars; they had no place to bury them. To go ahead, I will always remember a car. The woman who was sitting on the side of the driver was killed, the head out of the car like that completely full of blood, and everything kept going. That was something absolutely awful. 

We kept going until the house of one of our cousins who was a chaplain in the French army. He went to [inaudible word] there in the Pyrenees Mountains and we went to [inaudible word] since we were refugees at that time. After two days in his house, the Germans arrived and occupied the area. We escaped immediately, took the car and went to Toulouse, and there we did not have any gas to go on. It was impossible to buy gas. It was finished. So we had to wait during two weeks in the garage until the mayor gave us enough gas to go across France to the east in the Rhone Valley, in Valence, where my father had a brother.

There we lived for all the war. My father went back to Paris because he had to resume working there. He could not work in the south because, otherwise, he would have lost his right to teach in Paris again. He would have to apply again, and it could take up to 20 years to be authorized again. So he lived in Paris and the rest of the family lived in Valence, a town of 40,000 people.

Lang: The emphasis, originally — when the war started in 1940 — to leave Paris, was what? Not everybody was leaving.
ROBERT: Many who had a place to live and did not have to live in Paris, left Paris, because everybody knows that during a war the big towns are bombed energetically. 

Lang: So life really changed radically for …
ROBERT: It was a complete change because my father took more than two years before he could come and see us again. In Paris he started an underground group to resist the Germans. When he asked London to recognize his group, they said no, you have to have a general and a head. So he went to see his former captain of the First World War, who was a general at that time, and the general said OK. This general was General Basse [spells out]. He said OK, and so his group was recognized. Their work in Paris was to — besides being a teacher, he worked getting all the information he could to send to London. So they were spying a little bit and helping. They had a group, too, that was in charge of destroying anybody who could be dangerous. For instance, they were watching for a certain time the chief of the Milice. The Milice was the French Gestapo. They had a black uniform, and they had the right to shoot anybody without asking anything. If they shot somebody, nobody had to ask them why. They were very dangerous. They were able to track this man, and at the time they were going to do something, he was assassinated by somebody else [laughs].

Lang: The year was 1941?
ROBERT: He started his resistance in October of 1940.

Lang: Already then.
ROBERT: Already, immediately. He had to have the time to get in touch with London, which was not very easy, as you can guess, because France was occupied.

Lang: The occupation was in June, so it was very …
ROBERT: Yes.

Lang: Did the resistance organization that he formed have a name?
ROBERT: The Volontaires de la Mort. The Volunteers of the Death. They had a hard time to — so very often my father was in a car that broadcast to London, but the car had to go fast on the roads outside of Paris to not be tracked. They had to broadcast very fast, to give the information very fast, then disappear. It could be dangerous. One day my father was not able to go to broadcast, and the man who replaced him was caught by the Germans. A narrow escape.

Lang: You met some of these people eventually, who your father worked with in the Resistance?
ROBERT: I met with somebody that he sent to me. His name was Rabier [sp?]. It was not Rabier, but that was the name he had. I tried to not know him too much. What we did in the Resistance, we tried to not know the others, so if we were tortured we would not be able to talk. We would be able to fool the Germans as much as possible. We would have been killed anyway, but we would not have given any information.

Lang: But from what you know now, what types of people were in the Resistance with your father? Did it follow a class line? Your father was a teacher. Were there other teachers? Were there …?
ROBERT: He had some of his former students. He even asked one of his students, who was brilliant, to enter the Milice, the Gestapo, to infiltrate the Gestapo and give information about them. Which means many people saw him in uniform, so when the war was over, the police were called all the time to arrest him, and my father all the time had to say no. Finally he had to go for trial because he had used the uniform. He went to trial, and my father was the witness saying, “No, I’m sorry. I sent him there. He was working for us, not for the Germans.”

Lang: Sure. Your mother was completely aware of what your father was doing? The whole family knew?
ROBERT: Yes, absolutely. We all worked together, but not knowing to whom we could talk, because you never knew if the others were for or against. There were a certain number of people who were for Marshal Pétain, who was collaborating with the Germans.

Lang: You mentioned yourself. So eventually you were a member of the Resistance also?
ROBERT: Yes, but what we had to do — everybody who was born between 1919 and 1922 had to go to Germany for working in the factories. Since the Germans, all the men, were fighting, they needed people in the factories to make ammunitions, all kinds of work for the Germans, the slaves of the Germans. It was called the service [French phrase]. I tried to escape from that because if I had gone to Germany, automatically being been born in Alsace, I would have been a German, and would go to the Russian front for fighting the Russians. So I always tried to escape from these guys. We had to make nine months of service in a group that would replace the French army. We had uniforms, but no weapons. We were used for making all kinds of works in the forest, to clear [or clean?] the forest, to make big cuts in the forest, so if the forest burnt, they would be cut into pieces, and the fire would not extend. Or working in the mountains to cut some plants that were used to make artificial textiles for making clothes. All kinds of things that the government thought were useful. 

When I was done with this time, I was put on a train because those of my age were supposed to go to Germany. Three of the chiefs of our group came with me, and we went to a town 250 kilometers by train to go to see the German doctors to be incorporated for going to Germany. Many of my friends jumped from the train every time the train was slowing down in the mountains and escaped to go to the underground. 

I went to the camp, the barbed wires there, the Germans taking care of that. Then when I had to be checked, I said to the German doctor — he had a beautiful uniform — I said that my heart does not work very well. I have so much trouble and so forth. He listened and said, “I don’t hear anything.” I insisted so much he called a second doctor who came and listened too. Then a third one. I insisted I was in very poor shape, and then they talked together for a few minutes. They came back and said, “OK. Go to this office there.” At the office they gave me the paper saying that I was not able to go to Germany. So I went back to the chiefs there, and they said, “We had already found a trick that we would have helped you get out of here. It would have been good” [laughs]. 

I came back from the camp, and I decided I had two choices. If I had a job, I might not have gone to Germany. Second thing, if I was a student, I might not have gone to Germany because sometimes they wanted the students to stay. Sometimes they wanted the students to go, but somebody where they worked would stay. I went to see the pastor in town. He said, “I will see the mayor.” The mayor said OK, somebody’s going to give him a place, and they put me as a controller of the service of distribution of the food tickets. So I was there in control of the thing; I had 28 employees who were working with me.

Lang: In the camp?
ROBERT: No, in the town. When I was freed from the thing, after. In our town. So there I had a job, and at the same time I registered in the université to be a student. But I did not study anyway, and I was there for almost all the time when the Germans called me to have a visit, to go to Germany. I went to see the big chief of the Germans there and said, “I work in town for the, what was it called [French word], for taking care of the food tickets. I have nobody who could replace me.” He said, “I will see that.” So I went to take a test again to see if I was going to Germany, and then I got a paper that was not going to go. Again, while I was there, there was a telephone call to the Germans, the other one that I had seen, who said I would not go. 

When I saw the French police there, I went out. They said, “That’s OK, but we had a system for you. If they had taken you, we had found a way that you would go through the restrooms, and we would have rescued you by a window.” The police were with me since I was in charge of all these tickets. I had a huge room without any window and with a big, thick door of steel where the tickets were that were more precious than money. That’s why I knew all the policemen of the town, because they came to watch when we went to get the tickets. They had their weapons so the tickets would not be stolen and so forth. So they were all on my side. 

Anyway, so during that time my father sent me Rabier, somebody from Paris, so I could work with the underground there. Rabier asked if we could give tickets to help the underground that was in the mountains. I was able to fool the system by feeding 2,300 people in the mountains with the tickets. They got the tickets, and they could find the food there where they were.

Lang: When you say “fool the system” I know what you mean, but it may be interesting to know, had you been caught, given the circumstances of what was going on, what would the penalty have been?
ROBERT: It could have been death only, but I had false papers to be able to change identity if I was in danger. I have these papers here, my false identity. Here.

Lang: Your father’s organization prepared these papers for everyone who … 
ROBERT: Yes, for me. He did that for me. That’s my official false name with my real picture right there. Here [papers shuffle], that’s a paper saying that I was in the army and had been freed. I was never in the army anyway; I went home. I have all the information with my false name and false town where I was never born, and all the official real false stamps. You have all that information about what happened. When I left the army, they gave me $1,000 francs. All that I got back, seven days of tobacco, seven days of soap, one pair of socks and so forth. Everything was precise and absolutely true, falsely true. Here is a birth certificate. I have the stamp, but it’s empty so I could have filled it if I needed to disappear another time when it would become dangerous.

Lang: The idea would have been, someone would have let you know that they knew that you had falsified the meal tickets, and then you would have disappeared and used your new identity?
ROBERT: Yes, I could have done that, but I did not make anything false there. I used a trick that made it falsely legal [laughs]. The one who had my place before was in jail. He had sold the tickets for his own interest and he was in jail. They told me that they put me there because they knew that everything would be correct. It was correct officially, but it was not correct to go in the underground. Everything was lies in France at that time. For instance, our pastors delivered certificates of baptism to Jews who had not been baptized, so the Jews could present the certificate of baptism saying, “I’m sorry. I’m Protestant.” Everybody went making false things in order to save the others.

Lang: You knew of people who did this, Jews who had papers for baptismal? Were you …?
ROBERT: I knew the pastor did that in our church, but I don’t know who they were, and when there were things like that, we avoided to know. If we were tortured, we would put somebody else in danger.

Lang: In general, though, I’m curious what the general citizenry, the people that you lived near in the town, thought of Pétain or the collaboration with the Nazis in France in general. Can you give us a sense of that?
ROBERT: We knew that some were with the government. Some were with the government because many people turn according to where the government is. They are always on the right side, the safe side. We had to look like we were for the government; otherwise that was [done with force?]. So every morning in school, all the students were there, we raised the flag — that was the only place where we were authorized to have a French flag —and we sang the hymn to Marshal Pétain. Then we went to school. So we had to [inaudible]. We sang that; we sang it loud, not believing a single word of that song. 

At that time my father had to [inaudible] a certain number of Jews in Paris; he had a big amount of Jews around him. In order that they could disappear and not be in the crowd, they had to have false papers. What he did is send us the pictures of these people with the initials that they wanted on the identification card. I brought that to the prefecture, who was the county seat or something like that. There was a man making all the official papers, identification cards. He took the pictures, looked at the edge, looked in the big book of the identification cards where everything was registered, parents and everything. He looked up somebody with the same initials that were given, somebody who was born about the same time, and with the picture made an official identification card with a number that was in the big book, so the paper was absolutely legal. We managed to send that to Paris. I will talk about that a little bit later.

Lang: I’m curious, when you say your father sent you the names of the cards, was it hand-delivered by someone from your father to you? Was it mailed?
ROBERT: No, there was no mail. Between the two I showed you on the map, what was called ligne de demarcation. It was impossible to cross without being checked by the Germans.

Lang: So someone had to deliver these.
ROBERT: They could not send them by mail because the only way we could correspond with Paris, that was by cards, and we could not write. We had father, mother, and so forth, and we could add two words after each word that was on the card. That was not personal. Sometimes could cross a word — born or dead or so forth. We had the name and we crossed the word that did not work, so we could not make a beautiful literature or poetry with this stupid card. It’s too bad I don’t have any here. I would have loaned that to you. That’s really something. No way of communicating any secrets except with the tricks that my father had. He was really sharp and had all kinds of tricks. We had to think sometimes in order to find out what he meant.

Lang: So when you made up the cards, you would have someone deliver …? 
ROBERT: What we did was to have my one of my sisters take a ticket, because you had to have a reservation three weeks before so the Germans could check on the people who were going to travel. My mother put the cards, made some things like sometimes in the family you put some clothes with embroidered on something, that looked like some craft, and the cards were inside. The Germans never got that, except one day my sister was in the train and we had not the cards yet — I got them at the last second — I gave that to my other sister and said, “Go and bring that to the train. We’ll see what happens.”  So she arrived at the train. My other sister was in the train at the window and my sister gave that directly like that between two Germans sentries. They did not ask any question and it went. So you see, it was a rather risky life at that time.

Lang: The gentleman that was in the registrar’s office falsified the documents. He was a member of your group?
ROBERT: No.

Lang: He was just sympathetic?
ROBERT: He was. I don’t know in which group he was. I was not particularly in the group; I was working for the resistance but without being really in the group. I corresponded with my father, and from there I got some connections. I avoided to know their names and to know where they lived.

Lang: I guess what I’m getting at is you must have had an idea that this man at the registrar’s office would help you.
ROBERT: Oh, yes. Sure.

Lang: You wouldn’t have gone there without …?
ROBERT: Absolutely. I had to know by somebody that we would be connected. That’s what we did. Sometimes I got information. They said you are going to see Monique. I did not know Monique. One day she came to my office and she was — first she tried to be sure that I was the one that she had to see. She went to get tickets to bring to the underground in the mountains. That’s all that I knew. Monique. I did not talk to her. I did not try to know who she was or where she came from because I should not know her name in case something would happen. So about these identification cards. When a Jew had that and was caught by the police, the police looked at the number on the card, called the office where the card had been made, and the office had to give the name. The fact that the office gave the name [meant] that the card was right [laughs]. And the Germans, once more, were tricked.

Lang: How many cards, do you know?
ROBERT: Several hundred. We never counted them [inaudible]. We did not take into account about that.

Lang: But they always went back through to …?
ROBERT: He got them every time, and he was able to keep these people in the underground. In Paris, the Jews had to wear the yellow star. I had a star here. I was not able to find it this week. I was looking for it. That’s too bad because …

Lang: Only in Paris the Jews wore the yellow star?
ROBERT: No. In the northern, what was called the zone occupée, occupation by the Germans.

Lang: Arthur, do you want to take a break? Or do you want to wait a bit?
ROBERT: Yes, I could take a break.

[Recording pauses then resumes.]

Lang: Arthur, now that we’ve taken a little break, I want to go back and get a little more family history, the names of your sisters, names of your grandparents, just so we have it for the record. You said you had two sisters.
ROBERT: Alice [French pronunciation, Alís], who died 12 years ago. Genevieve [French pronunciation, Genviév], who is still in France. Genevieve is married and has two children. She came to the states about five years ago with her husband to see us. It was their first trip going to the States. My mother was Marguerite, and her maiden name was Wild [pronounces it Veeld; spells out]. It was a [inaudible] name, coming from Germany. My father was Arthur [French pronunciation, Artúr] also.

Lang: His father, did you know your grandfather?
ROBERT: Emile. He was a teacher, too.

Lang: Anything more going back, great-grandfather that you know of?
ROBERT: I don’t remember the names of all of them. I have the whole genealogy in my safe here, but I don’t know all the names. I did not know my grandfather, or even one grandmother. They died before the war. One died before the First World War. I knew one grandmother for about one year. When you don’t know the people, you forget their names.

Lang: Now if we can return to — we’re in Paris. You had graduated high school or the equivalent. I’m a little bit hazy as to what happened between the ages of 19 and 20. That must have been 1939 and 1940. The invasion was in 1940. What were you doing in that time? Had you already gone into the seminary?
ROBERT: No, before the war I did not go there. I did not go to the seminary. I was still in school in 1939. I was going to take a test, but we had to escape because of the Germans, so then I went south. They were very nice. They decided that there would be a test again for those who had been refugees and could not take the test. I expected them to be very nice, but we were seven to take the written test, and I was the only one who passed, which proved they were not so nice anyway. Then I had to take the oral, and they did not help us at all. In geography, the teacher asked me in the oral test, he asked me where I was from. I said, “From Paris.” I thought, that’s nice. He’s going to give me something about Paris, because having been a refugee, he should have been nice. And then he asked me about all the details of the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Anyway, I passed. [There wasn’t] any problem there, but they were rather rough. Then I went to the seminary, after the war. I went to work in some parish with a pastor before I took the final test, and then I got rated.

Lang: So you left Paris before any of the restrictions were put on Jews.
ROBERT: Before the war. No, after, when the war was over. No, we were in the south at that time. We were in Valence. It was in Valence that we heard that now the Jews would have to register, and on the other side there, they would have to wear the yellow star.

Lang: So you did hear of that?
ROBERT: Oh, yes. It was in the newspaper. Everything was in the newspaper. The newspaper, since there was no paper to print, one sheet only. They stretched the sheet out that way so it could fold, and we had all the information given by the Germans.

Lang: Did it also speak of some of the deportations of French Jews?
ROBERT: Oh, no. That was the best-kept secret. They did not say anything. Sometimes they called that [French word, something-groupe], to put the Jews together. They had to be moved somewhere else, but they did not say that was for concentration camp. We did not know too much about this concentration camp except that once they were there, we never got news from them anymore. That helped us to have all kinds of suppositions, and the only supposition we made that was the real one was that they would disappear, and that was it.

Lang: In France, there were also, from my reading, some internment camps. Gurs and …
ROBERT: There was one in the Struthof in Alsace. That was the only one. Before there was a camp in Gurs in the Pyrenees, but they grouped a certain number of people and then they moved them to other places, and finally to Germany.

Lang: Do you remember the name of the pastor you mentioned in the city where you lived who falsified some papers? Do you remember his name? That wasn’t the pastor of the church where you went as a family?
ROBERT: Yes, but there were three pastors in that church. One was a Swiss. I don’t remember. I knew that was something that was done in many churches, not only the church where we went. Many churches. The Catholics said the child has to be baptized, and they insisted on that. The Protestants, no, we were not there to put any pressure on anybody; we were there for saving lives. It was not a question to figure out the people on our side.

Lang: I read also somewhere that some of the institutions didn’t require the baptismal. They allowed Jewish children into their schools, both Catholic and Protestant. They guaranteed to the parents that they wouldn’t convert them.
ROBERT: Yes. But we never tried that. What we did was to make all kinds of false papers to save these people. We did not hesitate to make things that were wrong officially in order to be right [laughs].

Lang: Did the — what to my mind, was a speedy surrender of the French to the Germans — was that a surprise to you?
ROBERT: Yes, that was a surprise because we had seen that there was a lot of armament. We saw the French tanks. They were beautiful, strong things. But what happened, it was disorganized by the Germans in France before. The Germans [inaudible] and they looked like being French, but that happened during the First World War too. My grandfather, my father too, were in the region of la Marne between Paris and Alsace. They lived in the country. They knew a man, what was called valet farm, the guy on the farm who manipulates the manure and things like that, does the dirty jobs and so forth. They take people of a low level — I don’t say they are of a low level; we are all of the same level — but for a low consideration, somebody who does not do too much, only does this dirty job. They saw him working and working. Then during the war, sooner or later the Germans came in the First World War, [inaudible] that’s the  Germans on horses. The colonel who was at the head of them, that was the one who had been taking care of the manure. He was a spy. 

Lang: Hmm. Interesting.
ROBERT: So they were good at — before the war, they organize everything. That’s what we found in France. The cannons were in place; the ammunitions were in the place where they needed the bullets for the guns and so forth. Everything went to the wrong direction because there were Germans who were there and looked French and who took care of messing the thing. Everything was really messed up. Also it seems that the French army was not prepared enough because they were talking about the war, but they were not ready for that. Just the year before the war, France sent a lot of sheepskin to Germany, and they needed that for the war in the winter. It seems like there was a lot of treason from France. Also some French were fascists, so they were automatically in the camp of Hitler and the [inaudible]. We were surprised and we were very sad because the French army had been able to fight so well in the First World War. It did not make any sense to see these soldiers not having the possibility to fight correctly because they did not have what existed at their own place.

Lang: Getting back to your father getting false papers for Jews in Paris, did your father ever speak of any work with Jewish resistance groups in Paris, or are you aware of any, or did you have any contact?
ROBERT: He did not say if there were Jews or not that he worked with. To him, that was people. He did not make categories  — this was a Jew, this was not a Jew — and he could not give information about that to us. We would even have refused to get information because all these people who were in the Resistance, in the underground, tried to not know anything about the business of the others. We had a friend in our church. He was a bit older than I was, and I did not know what he did. One day I heard that he had been the chief of the Resistance of one third of France. The Germans caught him, and they understood they had the right — they’d get a lot of information,  so they tortured him. He did not say anything. They pulled one of his nails. He did not say anything. All the nails went. He did not say anything. So they poked both of his eyes. He did not say anything. Finally they pulled out his tongue and let him die. I was at his funeral. You see, people have to be strong in order to not give any name. He was the head; he could have given everybody in order to not be tortured. That was not a joke, the Resistance. That was risky, but we had to do it.

Lang: You mentioned heading south. Now I’ve read that the very of southern coast of France was almost considered a safe zone for Jews for a period of time, and then the Italians got involved and came across into Provence, for example. Do you know much about that, or do you recall what …?
ROBERT: It seems I know something about the Jews being called to Italy, I think. I don’t know if that was a trick or not from the Germans. I don’t remember that.

Lang: Even at that time in the ’40s, the southern coast of France was considered a vacation area. I read accounts where families would be living in hotels in Nice and Cannes and different areas, just to try to escape being rounded up in the north. But when the Italians got involved, then that area also became difficult to …
ROBERT: I was in that area when the Italians came, the Italian army. We were just drafted to what was called the [sounds like chante la jeunesse?] there, and we arrived there a few days after the general allies as they landed in North Africa. Immediately the Germans moved their troops there to protect in case the Americans would invade by the south. The Italians came from Italy jointly. In the town where we were we saw that the Italian army were coming on bicycles, which was very cute because the Germans were coming in cars and tanks. They came on their bikes, and they occupied the railway where we were. 

We went to the café all the time. On Sunday we had nothing to do, so we went to the café and all the Italians were playing the morra [a game] in the café, and we had a good time there. Not talking to them, but trying to get their feathers because they have big hats like that with a beautiful feather [inaudible French word]. When an Italian put his hat on the counter to do something, we were always one of us cutting the feather and keeping that as a trophy [laughs]. Anyway, they were not dangerous, these Italians. They were just the poor guys in the battle. They were not happy to have to occupy France because that was not by their own will. As soon as they could get Mussolini down, they did it. We did not joke about the Germans. They were dangerous.

Lang: I’m surprised to hear you say that you would go to a funeral. Wouldn’t it be dangerous to go to a funeral of this …?
ROBERT: No. It was immediately after he had been killed. He was killed in the last day of the occupation of the Germans, the last week. So we were at his funeral there. His brother was there. He was about the same age. That was very sad. 

There was something else while I was working there. My older sister saw a man who needed lessons for his children, a son and a daughter. She said she could give them lessons in mathematics, physics, and so forth. And then I gave lessons in French and Latin to them. My sister said this man has skin a little bit dark. He has dark hair. She said he could either be a Jew or a Palestinian. So, OK. We gave our lessons without any problem, and we were sure that they were Jews, but we were not going to say it. My sister said one day, “You know if one day you have trouble, just come to our place.” They understood that we understood that they understood. The thing was like that. Everything was OK. 

One evening in August, it was awfully hot. The girl came to our place and said to us, “The Gestapo is looking for us. Can we come in?” We said, “Yes, come.” She was shaking like that. She had been very cold. Then the boy came and said, “My parents will arrive immediately.” So we took them in the house. It came to be interesting because the Germans were looking for them. It was very easy to see that some people had come to our place.

Lang: Your father was in Paris.
ROBERT: Yes. That was in the place there in Valence, in southern France.

Lang: So it was you and your two sisters and your mother.
ROBERT: And we had a neighbor who was an attorney at law and was a Jew. He was in the next house there. He was not careful at all. We were scared for him because he had always to know what’s going on when it was better for him to not show too much, and we were scared for ourselves too because he could have been caught. We could have been caught too. A very nice man. Very sharp. 

But anyway, these men there were in our house. We kept them for nine days and nine nights. The time felt very long. We kept the windows shut, the shutters almost completely shut. In August it was hot. We played a game all the time with them that they would not be too scared waiting, wondering what was going on. They always wanted to get out. We said, “No. We’ll take care of you.” We were looking for a place where they could disappear in the country because in the country the people were nice, and generally the brood on the Alsace were not in the country as they were in towns. They found a school, a lycée where the kids could study, and they disappeared there in the village. His name was Finkelstein and he changed his name into [French name, Marseillan?].

Lang: Finkelstein?
ROBERT: Finkelstein. We knew at the time that they were really Jews. Nice people. We saw them after the war. He lost his two factories that he had in Paris. But after we saw him back in Paris, he started factories again. Then his son took over for the factories and their daughter became a physician.

Lang: They were able to live the rest of the war out in school in the country?
ROBERT: Not quite. The mother died. She had appendicitis, and during the war it was difficult to find a doctor and to move from one place to the other. When she got to the hospital, it was too late. The two children took what was called the baccalaureate, the test after 13 years of school. They took their tests, and they passed with their false name. They had all their official papers with the false name, their certificates. When the war was over, all those who had taken their tests under a false name went to court and they got an exchange for the real [laughs]. So they went back to Paris, and we were glad that they were safe like that.

There was another, a [Levy?]. He lived in Paris, a jeweler. He escaped and arrived in southern France with a trunk this big, this wide, and this tall, full of jewels, gold, diamonds, and everything like that. We kept that in our garage, always wondering if one day the Germans would ask us what it was.

Lang: Your neighbors in the neighborhood where you lived, weren’t you concerned that some of them might have turned you in, having seen the people come and go in the house?
ROBERT: I don’t think anybody there. That was rather a friendly corner there. I don’t think there would have been danger. But you never know in that case. You never know. We had to take the risk. If we had not done that, it was the Jews going to Germany, and that was not for tourism there. We did that, and we were ready to take the consequences. If nobody had done that, it would have been a bigger mess for all the Jews who would not have been protected. The father was in Lyon because it was easier to be in a big town and not be caught than in little towns. In little towns there are many people who know each other. In a big town, the people don’t know each other. A Jew can be there and nobody would know if he’s a Jew.

Lang: Did you get the sense that there were more people hiding Jews as you did for longer periods of time?
ROBERT: Yes. Many were caught. Some were sharp. I don’t mean that those who were caught were not sharp. Some were lucky enough, being sharp too, were lucky enough to find a way to escape. When everybody in the street had to wear the star, they just decided to catch everybody who was there. That was difficult to escape, and sometimes the German police saw a man, to know if he was a Jew, they asked him to take off his clothes to see if he was circumcised. If they were not circumcised, they escaped, they were safe, but they were not Jews then.

Lang: It wasn’t only the German officers. The Vichy did the same thing.
ROBERT: Yes. The police, the official police, those who were at the head because the police did not follow exactly the government. For instance, they saved the Jews; the police saved Jews. Many American planes were knocked down over a town when they were attacking. They were attacking from the south on their retreats and left several people on the place. The equipment, the crew of two tanks was stopped there and could not escape. So the farmers took these Americans. There were eight Americans. They took them in their house and called the police. The police came from town. Five policemen in a car came to the farm, took off their uniforms and put them on the Americans, went to town with these Americans with their French police uniforms, crossed the bridge to go to the other side to go to the underground, came back, and did the same thing for the second team. The police did that, and that was the police that was under the orders of the Vichy. So you have things like that. We are good at fooling the Germans. 

Lang: Still, somewhere in the neighborhood of 80- to 90,000 Jews were deported out of France. I guess I’m saying that not everyone was as courageous and took the risks as you and your family were willing to.
ROBERT: Many people. I have this tape here of a town in the [French word]. It was 45 miles from where we lived. They took all the Jews they could without saying anything. They came to school. Their families lived among the other people. Many families took two, three, or four children, or even the whole Jewish family there, and they did not say anything. Everything went fine, and the Germans never guessed. They even went to the café in front of a place where there was a big group of Jews, and they never had any idea that there were Jews there. There were things that were absolutely fantastic, but it was not possible everywhere what was possible in this little town. That’s the only example I know about that, but there are other places where it was more the individuals doing there. In that town, everybody, the whole town were accomplices of the Jews, and nobody said anything and it never went anyplace.

Lang: Arthur, could you bring us then current towards the end of the war? What were your activities at the time of liberation from France by the Americans? What were you doing and what was your reaction?
ROBERT: The first thing was I got information that we had to know all the pieces of artillery of the Germans in the town. Some were very easy to find. They told me that I had to give information before 5:00pm in the evening. I saw that something was going to happen, and I got to find a certain gun that I did not know where it was. I was getting out of my office, and I was walking in front of the Gestapo building, and there was a German in civilian clothes, in plain clothes, but he had a good German accent, and he said, “La bataille pour Valence a commence” — that means the battle for Valence has started. Valence was the town where I was. I said, “Oh! Do you think so?” At that time, boom! A gun shoots loudly. I said, “Boy! That’s not very far. Where is it?” That was the question I should not have asked, “Where is it?” He took his pistol, put it in front of my nose, and he called a sentry who was there in front of the Gestapo building. The guy left his rifle there on the wall, came to me. 

My problem was that being born in Alsace, the Alsace and Lorraine had been taken by the Germans, and the Lorraine has a certain cross that has a shape. That was the cross of General de Gaulle — all the flags of General de Gaulle had the Quad Lorraine, and I had that on my tie. Once I saw a guy with a submachine gun in a street where I was walking, French Gestapo. He said, “You are Lorraine?” I said, “Yes.” I was born in a town that belonged to Lorraine before but was put into Alsace a little bit later, so I was Lorraine. So I did not say anything. I had that there [the tie with the cross], and it was possible to see it, and when I thought that something was suspicious, I just moved my shoulders a little bit, and my jacket went up and the cross disappeared. So, OK. But then the guy held me like that. What I did, I took my billfold out of my pocket, thinking if I show my billfold he will say, “No, I don’t need it.” Because since I showed it, I have nothing wrong there. The trouble is, in my billfold I had the papers that had been sent by the American planes. They sent papers saying how to make Germans prisoners, have the papers and fill the papers so it would go faster when the American army came to have a German write his name and give the paper with the German to the army, so they would not waste time to fill the papers. I had that there.

I gave that. He said, “No.” I took my billfold, and at the same time I took my tie and put my tie with the billfold inside of the pocket. That was much safer. He kept talking to me, and I was smiling. He certainly thought I was completely cuckoo, that I was smiling. He said two words to the soldier who left me and went back to his rifle. He said, “You can go.” Then I thought, “I have to hold my legs” — because my legs wanted to go fast. I knew that sometimes after having somebody suspicious, they shot the bullets there. So I was waiting for the bullets, and I walked as slowly as I could, but not evidently, and as soon as I had taken the first crossing, full speed I went to the door of one of our friends who was Alsatian, the farmer’s sister. Instead of going inside the pharmacy I took the door going to the apartment, I shut the door, and I started shaking like that. The reaction. As long as I was outside, that was OK, but reaction. I said, “Boy, that was a narrow escape.” So during the night …

Lang:  Right before the end of the …?
ROBERT: Yes. Then during the night I was a volunteer to take care of the refugees in town because the first bombing by the Americans had killed 4,000 people out of 40,000. 4,000 dead. So many refugees were there in the former theater. We had the Protestant foyer, too. We had a lot of straw on the floor so they could sleep there, and we took the chairs. We were three there watching during the night, each one taking two hours of watch. I took the first hour then I went to sleep. The second took his two hours, and then instead of watching, he fell asleep, and then started a shooting by the Americans. 

They came with their tanks and stuff, shooting everywhere in the building, and the people who escaped did not know where the shelters were. They disappeared. I watched the fireworks there for about two hours, and that was it. In the morning, I was with some friends because the Americans had retreated. They lost 106 vehicles, and we went there where the battle was. My gun, that I had not found, was in an orchard. The road went like that around the orchard. The gun was there facing the road. They just shot, and they got all their vehicles. I was mad that I could not have found the gun. Anyway, they came back and shot us later. 

A few days later I went to work and I got to be the [French word?] because I had the key to the office for the distribution of the tickets. I went by foot because the Germans were retreating and they stole all the bikes. So I kept my bike home and I went by foot. I had to cross a boulevard. And here was the French underground shooting at the Germans that were here and I had to cross. The Germans were behind a wall along the railroad, so I went under, along the wall to cross that less than [inaudible]. When I arrived at my office, about 100 meters from there, I saw people in uniforms on vehicles I had never seen. I said, “That might be the Americans.” I went there, we shook hands and that was great, and I said to my workers, “OK. We will not work today. We’ll see tomorrow what will happen.” And that’s when we were liberated.  

OK, you still have questions. I still have many answers. I am living again the time. That was great, the time I had there. I remember it as a beautiful time because I was young. And at least we did something. We didn’t … 

Lang: You were about 25?
ROBERT: I was 24 when we were liberated. We had the feeling that we were doing something useful, so that was a great time.

Lang: Then you went back to Paris and reconnected with your father?
ROBERT: Yes, my father was able to come. He got an authorization once to come, and he had to cross this famous place. He was hesitating between taking the train and risking to be caught with the documents, or crossing the road. At a certain place, what they call the ligne de la demarcation between the north and the south, they had a road where it was forbidden to go and they had German patrols going back and forth. There was a forest on each side, at least a grove of trees. There was a possibility to be there, watch the patrol for a certain time going back and forth, counting how much time there was after the patrol, to jump on the other side of the wall and be in the other zone. He was thinking of that. He finally decided to take the train. 

He had all his documents in his billfold, and he decided to put that under his bench, and then the train stopped at the place of the check. The Germans came and started looking everywhere, and at the last second my father said, “I will not leave that under,” and put it back in his pocket. The Germans looked under and asked for his papers. He took his billfold where he had all his documents and he started a beautiful story. He was good at that!

He said, “Here are the papers that were given, that I had to make a speech from the Minister of Education.” And he explained the way he did that and so forth. He had the speech ready and he started talking about that. All the documents were under. That was really a flood, you know, like in the central United States, a flood, hah! The Germans were almost drawn in that. They said, “OK,” and he passed all these papers that had to go to England, going toward Spain. 

There was a thing too, for the people who wanted to escape from France. The trick was to go to Spain, to cross the border, because the regime of Franco was for Hitler. You crossed the border, and as soon as you were on the other side of the border, you tried to be caught by the Spanish police. You had to look like you were trying to go to France, so they stopped you. “What are you doing?” “I’m trying to go to France.” “Where are you coming from?” “From Portugal.” Phhhhht! They send back to Portugal, and that was really what they were looking for. From Portugal, then they could go to England.

Lang: Overall, you seem to be quite proud of what you know the French did, in terms of trying to protect Jews, hide Jews, and …
ROBERT: Yes. I am proud and not proud. I am proud of what the Resistance has done, but I am not proud of what some of the French have done, because it was really awful. They were collaborating with the Germans to try to catch the Jews. For these people, that was …

Lang: You see both sides.
ROBERT: Yes. I think there was more good than bad, but you always find people who could do something, and they are too scared. They say, “OK, that’s not my business if they are caught, these Jews. I don’t care, I prefer to save my skin than to save their skins if there is to choose.” There was something interesting too, about these Jews. Many Jews were not believers. They were Jews, but they did not follow their religion. Many said, “Now that we are persecuted, we have to know why,” and they started studying their religion.

Lang: To be much more fervent …
ROBERT: Yes, because it’s stupid to die without knowing why.

Lang: Where did you notice that? In the mountains, or in Paris, or …?
ROBERT: It was known in many places. I did not see somebody who was trying to get deeper in his religion. The Jew we had in our house for nine days, I don’t think we even talked about religion. He was a Jew, but I would doubt that he was really practicing his religion.

Lang: After you went to the seminary and eventually spent many years in Africa, were some of these experiences of antisemitism and what you saw at a relatively young age, age 20-25, how did it affect the rest of your life and your beliefs and what you ended up doing?
ROBERT: I don’t think I was affected by that. I was affected by the fact that there are people who suffer and suffer for their beliefs, but it was not a surprise for me because my ancestors were persecuted. Not only that, but the Protestants in France were …

Lang: Also persecuted.
ROBERT: Even after. France was mainly Catholic. Many did not practice too much their religion, but they went to church anyway, even if they did not believe deeply. And the Protestants are two percent, which is a minority. Until the Catholics started having Vatican II and started ecumenism, no? We had some trouble. I remember when our pastor in our church was in town on a sidewalk, and the priest was on the same sidewalk, the priest crossed the street to not say hello to him. So you see that there was a rivalry, and I would say that in the lycée there was not that because I think that they were sharper than stupid people, not so set to wrong ideas. We had all kinds of trouble with the Catholics at that time. 

When my mother was young, they knew that she was Protestant, and the girls in her school tried to have her taking [off] her shoes, because at that time people did not walk barefoot like they do now. At the beginning of the century, people were dressed and did not go barefoot. They wanted to have her shoes to see it her feet were like the feet of a goat, because that would show that she had the feet of the devil because she was Protestant [laughs]. You see, when you’re going like that, with a spirit like that, it’s being almost persecuted. Now it’s much better. I would say that’s finished, I hope. 

We have seen so many stupidities in other places. I remember one day we had a camp in Belgium, in a little town that was deeply Catholic. I would say there are practically no Protestants in Belgium. But we had a missionary camp there in the town of Laneffe with many young people in the church studying missions. Then they said OK, what we could do is go to town, we have some Bibles here. We are going to distribute them to the people, visit with these people. So we did that. The next morning we were surprised to know that they were gathering all the Bibles in the middle of the place in town, and the priest was there to set fire to them. That was in 1947. That was not three centuries ago. It has changed since that time. The Protestants and Catholics in France have Bible studies together now.

Lang: Speaking of religion, when did you decide to become ordained?
ROBERT: I decided to go to the seminary before — several times. When I was eleven years old, I felt the call of being a missionary. I thought that it’s an idea that I have, that’s not real. But it came several times, and then when we were liberated, suddenly I thought the only possibility for me is to go to a seminary. I have to go. Even if it’s against my will, I have to go. So I went there, I studied there, and then I was sent to Madagascar.

Lang: Did you ever, Arthur, connect with some of the Jews who you knew earlier in Paris, or the Jews that you hid?
ROBERT: In school, no.

Lang: After the war?
ROBERT: I would have liked to, but it seems to me that certainly the majority had been sent to Germany. That’s what I fear. But I never had the opportunity to get in connection with them because it had been many years since I had left.

Lang: The Finkelsteins?
ROBERT: Yes, we saw them. We were invited by him several times to his house. My sister gave me some information about them a few years ago. He died a few years ago. He should have been old anyway. But my father still had relations with these Jews. After the war, we went to the houses of some of them. Some of them were still there, and he had a good group of Jews there. He worked, mostly with a community of Jews, not just any community, with a group of Jews who were friends together and he was in the group. He was helping them to not be known. They were all friendly and that was very great.

Lang: Sylvia, do you have some more questions?

Frankel: I was just curious — your father, even though he worked with the Resistance, continued to teach as a teacher in Paris during the war?
ROBERT: Sure. Those who were in the Resistance in town, they had to have a job; otherwise it  would have look suspicious to the Germans because the Germans knew a lot. Their police were working hard. They knew if somebody was not occupied, did not have a job, it was not normal at that time. Either you had to be written as having lost your job, and then you were helped officially. But they were watching those who looked like they had not anything to do. My father, being a teacher, and all the other teachers who were against the government of the Germans, being even though they were government teachers, they were officially for the government, but really they were against the government, like the majority of the people.

Frankel: Did he see his Jewish students disappear? Did he make any mention?
ROBERT: I never heard about his students. He never talked about that. I don’t remember. He had Jewish students in school. He knew that they were Jewish. He tutored some of his students, and among them he had a few Jews. He liked all his students; he had good relations with his students even after the war. It’s difficult to remember. We did not talk too much about that. After, when I was in the seminary, I came a few hours a week to our home, and very often he was teaching somewhere.

Frankel: Do you remember when the big [inaudible] happened?
ROBERT: Drancy? The [inaudible]. The Vélodrome d’Hiver?

Frankel: Do you know what happened; were you aware?
ROBERT: We heard about that, but I don’t think it was in the newspapers. Then there was the [French word] Drancy where they took 12,000 people to send them to Germany. Finkelstein was among them. His family was in town, and he was caught there. He found, I don’t remember which kind of trick he got, it was a question of health, and they let him go. But he was in Drancy among those who were going to go. He told us stories about this place there. That was awful.

Lang: I can’t remember, but wasn’t there a prime minister at the time that opposed the occupation? No, he became prime minister after, in the 50s. Jewish? I can’t remember his name.
Frankel: Mandel.
ROBERT: Georges Mandel? Minister, I think before the war.

Frankel: After the war.
ROBERT: That’s not Mandel. Mandel was executed in July ’44 by the Milice. A Jew. Mendès France? Mendès France! He was a socialist.

Lang: Yes.
ROBERT: He was the minister who — he died a few years ago.

Lang: I think he was an officer in the occupation troops, but he refused to participate in the deportation. I’m sorry. Go ahead.

Frankel: Was your father recognized after the war as one of the Righteous?
ROBERT: He got a medal, the Médaille de la Résistance.

Frankel: In France, but what about in Jerusalem by Yad Vashem? Was he ever recognized by them?
ROBERT: No. His work for the Jews was so secret that I suppose that even in the Resistance they didn’t know that. His resistance was to catch the Milice, to try and infiltrate them, to try to put the right bombs at the right place, but there was the Resistance one one thing and the Jews another thing. He got the medals for the Resistance and the question of Jews did not come to the surface. He thought that was absolutely normal, like the Resistance anyway. But his work with the Jews, he did not think that as a factor of the Resistance; he took that as humanitarian work and friendship.

Frankel: What was the name of the [inaudible]? He attended the funeral? Do you know him?
ROBERT: Delpeuch [spells out]. He died in Lyon, in the Gestapo building, and he was buried in Valence. He was a great guy.

Lang: I understand you have grandchildren. Great-grandchildren?
ROBERT: Grandchildren. Two sons. One born four years ago, the other three years ago. I came from Minneapolis to baptize them. Our daughter had a son the fourth of April and I baptized him one month later, and now we are waiting for the birth of one who will be born in January. Our daughter was married last year.

Lang? Is your wife still alive?
ROBERT: My wife? Yes. Yes.

Lang: What’s her name?
ROBERT: Marcia [spells out].

Lang: Was she a minister also?
ROBERT: No. She was commissioned as a missionary nurse, but she is not a minister. She cannot baptize; she cannot be an officiant for the religious service, but she had four years of Bible school. If it were now she might be ordained, but that was not her branch. Her branch was nursing. In Madagascar, she was a nurse in charge of visiting the different parishes in the area and taking care of Bible studies and things like that.

Lang: What did you do in Madagascar?
ROBERT: I was sent as a pastor, and I was in charge of the schools, to put the schools on the wheels [?] when some were going down and to add some higher classes, and during that time I made a lot of buildings. Then I baptized and buried many people, went to preach on Sundays. A missionary has to do everything.

Lang: I was asking about your grandchildren because somebody told me that one of them was given a Jewish name.
ROBERT: Isaac. Yes, that’s the one who was born in — it’s in our common heritage. We are all people of the Old Testament. We went away at a certain time, but the Old Testament is ours too. We have this common ground, which is wonderful. My great-great-grandfather, the one who escaped to Switzerland, his name was Abraham. Abraham, and his son was Isaac. My daughter looked at all the names of our ancestors and she said, “Oh, Isaac would be really good to be the son of Abraham” [laughs].

Lang: [Inaudible] because of what happened in France when you were there with the Nazis, having somebody with a Hebrew or Jewish name in your family?
ROBERT: No, many Christians have names that are from the Old Testament, that are already common names. You have these names. Benjamin. Many in France are called “Benjamin” and they are not Jews at all. Isaac would not be given [inaudible] in France, but in America we knew several Isaacs who were Protestants.

Lang: What are the names of your children?
ROBERT: First we have Claudia, who was born in ’61. Then my wife had some trouble. The doctor said we’ll be surprised if she can have more children. So we adopted Michael, who lives in Portland. He’s a doctor. Then the last one is Denise. We adopted her from Fargo, North Dakota. She was given by her mother, who was an Indian of the tribe of the Blackfoot. She does not look very Indian, anyway. At her wedding she had her grandfather and grandmother, Indians, who were there. Even her mother — finally after her birth, the father married her mother and she became a wife then, the mother of Denise. The mother was at the wedding too. She has other children now. The other children did not go at the same level as our daughter. They are not jealous of her, but they would have preferred to go the same way. Denise has a very good relation with her natural mother.

Lang: Grandchildren’s names? You have Isaac.
ROBERT: Because Michael married a Chilean lady, they gave him a Spanish name — Joaquin. Then Julia took a French name. That’s our three grandchildren. Now we are awaiting the next one in January. It’s not us who are going to give the name, so we are wondering what they’re going to choose.

Lang: You saw a lot during the war, and you saw what happened to a lot of people getting killed by the Germans. People want to understand about the Holocaust. The next generation, our children’s children, who see this videotape want to get some kind of insight. What kind of lessons would you tell future generations? What they should have learned about what went on?
ROBERT: They have to keep the roots of their religion to know what they believe, to try to never be converted against their will. Nobody has the right to force anybody to have a religion which is not his. Nobody can force anybody to have a religion against his own will, and we have to respect that. Everybody has to respect the other’s beliefs. To share our beliefs, sure. Everybody can learn by knowing the beliefs of the others, but resist any attempt from somebody to force their ideas. 

We know that as Protestants, after persecutions. I always want people to be free to believe what they want. They have to be faithful to what they believe, and to be witnesses of what they believe. I have a big admiration for the Jews because they have suffered so much through the centuries. When you learn the history of many countries where there were ghettos — they were chased, they were forced to try to be converted. I have a huge respect for them. They went through centuries, still strong, and still going ahead, still believing in their country in the Holy Land. 

When I was in the Holy Land, I guarantee you that I was there — that’s the Bible there, the geography, the history is the Bible. It’s there. Everything goes with the religion of the country. I think that’s great. There’s not a single country in the world that is completely the place where his religion and history is at the same place. That’s great.

Lang: You’re right. Is there anything, Arthur, that you want to add, that you would want on tape, to conclude? It can be on any subject. We’re easy.
ROBERT: Everywhere where people are persecuted for their religion or their race, even if it’s not a religion, that’s awful. We cannot be blamed because we are born a certain way. It’s not our fault. If we can talk about fault. That’s not our will. We have been placed here, and we have to do what we have to do where we are and be faithful to ourselves too. We have to believe that there is a God, and there is only one. We have to be careful to not think that there are all kinds of gods — except those who worship the money. There is a god. He really watches us and he loves us. We have to remember that, and to keep our faith.

Lang: Great. Thank you.
ROBERT: Thank you for the opportunity to share my past and my experiences.