Baillagou Marguerite

Baillagou, Marguerite File 8512 Marguerite Baillagou, a widow, had a shoe store in Cahors (Lot) where she lived with her daughter Madeleine. In the summer of 1942, she took in a nine-year-old Jewish girl from Paris, Claire Zitlenok. A year earlier, the child’s father had been incarcerated in the Drancy camp, and later deported to Auschwitz where he was killed. The girl’s mother, Léa, cleaned houses to support her three daughters. After a few months, the two older girls secretly crossed the demarcation line and found refuge in the southern part of France. When danger was at its peak, during the massive roundup of Jews living in Paris on July 16, 1942, one of Léa Zitlenok’s employers hid her and her daughter. Later, one of the older sisters who was active in an underground Jewish network for the rescue of children, returned to Paris to fetch her little sister and crossed safely back over the demarcation line with Claire. She then entrusted her to Marguerite Baillagou in Cahors, who treated the child as if she were her own daughter. Claire was enrolled into a convent school and used to go to mass on Sundays with her benefactress and her daughter, Madeleine, who was then 20 years old. “Madame Baillagou,” wrote Claude after the war, “always reminded me that all this was temporary, that I was Jewish and that the day would come when I would take back my own name and be with my own family. Madeleine treated me like a little sister. She took me for walks and I accompanied her on visits to her friends. Madame Baillagou never let me feel that what she was doing for me was out of the ordinary.” Madeleine herself describes her mother as “A very humane and generous person. She did all this naturally, transmitting to us, with the greatest simplicity, her love for all humanity and her sense of fraternity between all human beings.” On May 31, 1999, Yad Vashem recognized Marguerite Baillagou as Righteous among Nations.