Some individuals are conditioned to commit evil acts, while others appear to be inherently malicious.
In February 1944, two Jewish sisters from France, Denise and Micheline Lévy, were preparing to be sent to Auschwitz. They stood in line in the small village of Gemeaux, unaware of the horror awaiting them.
Denise and Micheline Lévy were just 10 and 9 years old when they were forcibly taken from their school in the small village of Gemeaux, near Dijon, in eastern France. It was the last time they would ever see their home.
One of the last acts they would endure before being placed on the transport was not an act of kindness but an act of sheer cruelty.
A French police officer grabbed the two dolls the girls were carrying—an image captured in the photograph at the top of the blog. There was no reason for him to do this; it wasn’t an order. He did it simply because he could. In his twisted mind, he believed it was the right thing to do, depriving two innocent children of their last source of comfort.
The officer knew the fate that awaited the girls. Yet, even with that knowledge, he couldn’t find a shred of humanity to allow them to keep their toys. He didn’t even take the dolls to pass on to other children; he simply discarded them.
The officer wasn’t an SS officer or a German Nazi but a French Gendarme.
The dolls were later discovered by a shopkeeper, who took them and gave them to Mrs. Gilles in the village. Mrs. Gilles passed them on to her twin daughters, who, in turn, gave them to their nieces. Despite this passing of hands, no child ever played with the dolls, knowing the painful history they carried.
One of the nieces, now in her forties, decided to donate the dolls to the SHOAH MEMORIAL in Paris, where they are now displayed, a symbol of the cruelty and the remnants of innocence lost during the Holocaust.
Micheline and Denise were about to turn 9 and 10 years old when they were interned in Drancy before being deported on March 7, 1944, on convoy 69 to Auschwitz-Birkenau. After three days and nights without food or water, the little girls were most likely murdered by gas as soon as they arrived at Birkenau. A document from Yad Vashem—like the mention of their death in the French Civil Register—states that Micheline and Denise were murdered on March 12, 1944. Deportation convoy number 69 had many more deportees than the usual average for France, with 1,501 deportees, including 178 children under 18 years old.
The SS murdered 1,311 people upon arrival, while 110 men and 80 women were “selected” for work. In 1945, only 35 survivors remained among them, including 14 women, and, among these, only one of the detainees from February 1944 in Dijon returned: Paulette LÉVY. The former Jules Ferry school, where she had been held before her deportation, along with Micheline and Denise LEVY, now bears her name.
On the morning of their arrest, the dolls belonging to Denise and Micheline, which a gendarme had thrown to the ground, were quickly picked up by Madame CHARLES, the mother of little Paul. She gave them to a friend, Laure GILLES, who had one-year-old twin daughters, Annie and Monique. The dolls were carefully preserved and later even restored: their wigs were redone by a specialist, and their dresses—one pink, the other blue—were recreated identically by Madeleine STORDEUR GILLES, the wife of Michel, the son of Laure GILLES. Michel had known Denise and Micheline well, as he had been in their class.
The dolls were then entrusted to the two daughters of Dominique and Gérard, Frédérique and Laurence GILLES. Three generations thus took care of these dolls—the last tangible traces of Micheline and Denise in Gemeaux. Neither Frédérique nor Laurence nor any of the previous caretakers ever played with them. According to Frédérique’s testimony, the dolls were preserved as “relics,” and each sister took hers when she got married. At the time, Frédérique and Laurence knew little of the story behind them, but they understood that they were “a special and important legacy.”
Frédérique GILLES describes what followed as “a twist of fate”: on May 8, 2012, Sylvain BLANDIN, president of the association mémoire(s)vive(s), unveiled a plaque in memory of the deported Jews of Gemeaux. This event revealed part of the secret of the dolls—the names of the little girls who had owned them during the war. Frédérique had hoped that some of their descendants might attend the ceremony, only to realize that the entire family had been annihilated.
Frédérique and her sister knew they could not keep silent about these two childhood companions of the murdered girls. But what should they do with them? To whom and how should they pass them on? A museum? Frédérique began researching this possibility and discovered on the Shoah Memorial’s website that archivists were organizing a collection just three days later at the synagogue in Dijon. The dolls were donated, then exhibited, and are now preserved at the Shoah Memorial.
Sources
https://www.cheminsdememoire.gouv.fr/fr/les-poupees-de-denise-et-micheline-levy-arretees-gemeaux-21
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.gemeaux.fr/static/d9fdde84e325d65b199008a3f1e81e10/lhistoire-de-micheline-et-denise-levy.pdf
https://www.leparisien.fr/culture-loisirs/il-ne-reste-que-les-poupees-18-09-2016-6129309.php
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