Dumoncel Rémy

Dumoncel, Rémy File 3100 At the outbreak of World War II, Rémy Dumoncel was the mayor of Avon, a small town near Fontainebleau. He also managed the Taillandier publishing house and therefore spent part of the week in Paris. He chose to publish only authors that did not collaborate with the Germans and also to defend Jewish authors. In addition to taking this courageous stand, Dumoncel was also active in the Resistance. He sought to help persecuted people, among whom were the Jews. He provided forged documents such as identity cards, transit documents, and ration cards. Dumoncel sheltered the Lederer family, German Jews who had fled to Strasbourg in 1933. When the war broke out in 1939, the authorities evacuated the Lederers to the département of Dordogne in southwest France. The Dumoncels sheltered the Lederers at Rémy’s widowed mother’s estate. The Lederer family consisted of M. and Mme Lederer and their three sons. One son, Arnold, arrived in Dordogne with a wife and son of his own. The other sons, Walter and Henri, who had served in the Foreign Legion, were demobilized after the armistice in June 1940. They joined their family on the Dumoncel estate, and worked for Dumoncel’s mother. When Rémy Dumoncel visited his mother late in the summer of 1940, he gave Henri Lederer forged identity papers, “just in case.” The Lederer family thus lived on the Dumoncel estate in relative tranquility until the liberation in August 1944. Henri, however, was arrested in 1942, by local French gendarmes because he was not a French citizen. He was interned in the concentration camp at St.-Pardoux-la-Rivière, north of Périgueux. He managed to escape and began to use the forged papers that Rémy Dumoncel had provided two years earlier, eluding his persecutors under the false name of Martin Lebel. The Gestapo monitored Rémy Dumoncel throughout the war and arrested him on May 4, 1944, as he attempted to obtain the release of several Avon town council members and of themunicipal secretary, Paul Mathéry, who had been arrested by the Germans. Although Dumoncel was not explicitly indicted, he was incarcerated in the prison camp at Compiègne, north of Paris, and was subsequently deported to the Neuengammen concentration camp near Hamburg, where he died of exhaustion on March 15, 1945. On January 17, 1985, Yad Vashem recognized Rémy Dumoncel as Righteous Among the Nations.