Douffet Renee

Douffet, Renée Twenty-year-old Renée Douffet from Koekelberg, a suburb of Brussels and Maryem Jacobs had known each other from their high school years and had become friends. During the early period of the occupation, Renée with her parents helped Maryem and her parents, by doing the shopping for them, as Jews had been restricted with places they could visit, and these only during certain hours. Renée also allowed the Jacobs family to use her mailing address, so that they could safely correspond with one of their sons who was in France. At one point, after the beginnings of the roundups in the summer of 1942, Renée suggested to her parents to take the Jacobs family into hiding, but they considered it too dangerous. Anxious to facilitate Maryem’s comings and goings on the street without danger, Renée took her parents’ marriage document, without their knowledge, as well as her own birth certificate, and gave it to her friend. Maryem went with these papers to the local registration office, and received official identification papers, although not in her true name, in lieu of those that she declared she had lost – and these served her well through most of the occupation years. Renée also supplied Maryem with other documents as well as letters addressed to Renée, for Maryem’s added security. After Maryem experienced in 1943, an encounter with the Gestapo, who checked her papers, and luckily let her go, she decided it would be best for her to find a hiding place in Matagne (province Namur) and in January 1944, she was taken into hiding by Marcel and Maria Van Vyve*, with whose children she had been friendly before the war. On July 17, 1977, Yad Vashem recognized Renée Douffet as Righteous Among the Nations.