de L'Epine Lucienne

Clément de l’Epine, Lucienne File 4599 During the occupation, Lucienne Clément de l’Epine worked indefatigably with the Jewish underground organization of WIZO in Paris, to spare Jewish children from deportation and extermination. Clément delivered more than 150 Jewish children, wards of the UGIF (Union Générale des Israélites de France), to adoptive families after providing them with false identity cards. Risking her life, Clément rushed from one distant village to another, visiting hidden children to ensure that they were being cared for properly. Although she was caught twice and interrogated by the Germans, she explained that she was a teacher and carried lists of children to recruit as private pupils. When France was liberated, Clément helped the children return to Jewish organizations. Henri Szpilberg is one of the children saved by Clément. In May 1941, the Germans arrested his father and sent him to Auschwitz, where he perished. In January 1944, Mme Szpilberg left Henri at the UGIF children’s home in Paris and, under an assumed identity, hid in a convent in Nogent-sur-Marne, not far from Paris. After the six-year-old Henri received a false identity card, Clément took him to the home of an elderly woman in Pont-de-Gennes, a village in the département of Sarthe. She paid the woman to look after him and visited him occasionally to make sure he was being treated well. Mme Szpilberg, still hiding in the convent, heard that the Germans had arrested children in the UGIF home where she had left Henri. Clément visited the convent and told Mme Szpilberg that Henri had been removed from the home in time and was alive and well; Mme Szpilberg gave Clément a jar of homemade jam for her son. Clément returned a while later and explained that the railroad to Henri’s village had been bombed; unable to visit Henri, she had given the jam to her own son, Claude, who was approximately Henri’s age. Clément had not told Mme Szpilberg her real name, but the Mother Superior ofthe convent knew that she was from Vincennes, that she had endangered her life for children who would probably forget her when they grew up. Mme Szpilberg was very upset when she heard this, and vowed that after the war she would look for the noble woman who had saved her son. She kept her promise, and spent several years searching house after house in Vincennes until she finally found Lucienne Clément de L’Epine. On March 1, 1990, Yad Vashem recognized Lucienne Clément de l’Epine as Righteous Among the Nations.