Le passé au présent

Memoirs of a Jew who was born in Brussels in 1932, relating her family's history. Her parents, Meier and Taube Markscheid, immigrated from Galicia to Belgium in the late 1920s. Léa was born in Brussels in 1932 as the younger of two sisters. After the German occupation, the family fled to France. They settled first in Larra (a village north of Toulouse), and then in nearby Grenade. In the spring of 1942, obliged to register as Jews, they were assigned to house arrest in Lacaune together with ca. 750 other Jews. Meier was arrested during a roundup in August 1942 and deported, via Drancy, to Blechhammer. He was taken on a death march from Blechhammer in January 1945 and perished in Buchenwald. Léa and her mother remained in Lacaune throughout the war; they survived with the aid of Christian neighbors, local authorities who wanted the Jews to stay, since their presence stimulated the local economy, and the Jewish and non-Jewish resistance. Her sister Fanny was sent to a boarding school, first in Toulouse and then in Castres, under the aegis of the Éclaireurs Israélites and, after the dissolution of the EI in January 1943, with the help of the Éclaireurs Unionistes. Another roundup took place in Lacaune in February 1943, but Léa and her mother were warned and went into hiding. Their landlords, the Lefèbvre family, received the award of Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 2011. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)