P.75 - Rachel Minc collection

P.75 - Rachel Minc collection Rachel Minc (born in Lodz, Poland, in 1899 and died in 1978) is a Polish-born French Jewish educator and writer who worked for the rescue of Jewish children during the Second World War. She studied educational psychology and pedagogy in Berlin, and then in the Scandinavian countries, where she met the anti-fascist pedagogue Minna Specht, founder, with Leonard Nelson, of the German resistance movement to Nazism, the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund (ISK). This movement was banned by the Nazis in 1933 and after the war allied with the German Social Democratic Party. When she arrived in France, Rachel Minc worked as a kindergarten teacher at the Refuge for Jewish Children in Neuilly-sur-Seine, and then at the Crocq colony in the Creuse department. She was saved from Nazi persecution by Janusz Zwolaskowki and his wife Suzanne who later were honouref as "Righteous Among the Nations". They are originally from Poland, he is a Catholic doctor. In August 1942, a short distance from the Zwolaskowki home, members of a rural training camp of the ORT for the training of young Jewish refugees, organized by René Bousquet, managed to escape to the free zone just a few hours before the roundup of 10,000 children on August 26, 1942. A policeman helps Rachel Minc to find refuge with the Zwolaskowki family. The two young women are hidden in a disused sheepfold. In November 1942, the Germans occupied the free zone. Rachel Minc had to leave this refuge and joined a clandestine rescue network of Jewish children in Grenoble. After the war, Rachel Minc informs the Zwolaskowki family of the tree planting project in her honor at the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem. Janus Zwolaskowki writes, in response: "All in all, I'm not involved in this matter. Providence has brought you home and protected us in such a way that no German has been able to go beyond the borders of my estate. I have only been an instrument for executing the will of God. This does not imply any merit, we are all God's farmers." After the war, she became a social worker and investigator for foster care. In her study of the post-war actions of the OSE, Katy Hazan (2006) notes: "At the same time, it was necessary to respond to the information that was coming from all sides as the camps in Germany were liberated and were having an impact on international organizations. A former educator of Polish origin, Rachel Minc, speaking and writing Yiddish perfectly, became indispensable in finding families. She was called the "Sherlock Holmes" of the OSE, and rarely came back empty-handed. She worked miracles when she welcomed the 467 young people from Buchenwald in June 1945. " At the commemoration of the Nazi-directed "Vel d'Hiv Roundup" on July 19, 2009, the president of the OSE, Jean-François Guthmann, declared: "At the Liberation, everything has to be done in the opposite direction, the children come out of their hiding places, they wait for their parents; few will have the chance to find them. The OSE opend 25 children's homes, searching for each child all over the world what remains of its biological or foster family, under the gentle authority of Germaine Mansour and Rachel Minc."