Muller René

Muller, René File 7191 René Muller, a French teacher born in Alsace, spent the war years as the assistant principal of the Vaugelas state high school for boys in Chambéry, capital of the département of Savoie. Muller despised the occupation regime and became active in the Resistance. Twelve Jewish children attended his large high school. Some were refugees from the occupied zone and others were permanent residents of the town. Some of the Jewish pupils had enrolled under borrowed names, while others used their real names. One morning in January 1944, Muller flung open a classroom door, moved toward Paul Honigman, and ordered him to leave because the Gestapo was searching for him. Muller went from classroom to classroom in this manner until all the Jewish students had escaped by leaping out of windows. Several minutes after the last student had fled, Gestapo agents arrived to arrest them. Three of them, Jacques Zederman, Max Tenenbaum, and Honigman, were cousins. Honigman walked directly to the home of Pierre Chambre (q.v.), his French teacher. Two years before, Chambre had asked him if he was Jewish. When Honigman answered in the affirmative, Chambre told him, “My door is always open to you at any time, day or night.” Muller and Chambre were both colleagues at work and Resistance members. Muller located Jewish children and warned their parents about searches, and Chambre placed them in hideouts and provided forged identification papers. On June 10, 1996, Yad Vashem recognized René Muller as Righteous Among the Nations.