Tessier Henri & Noémie ; Daughter: Jeanine (Tessier)

Tessier, Henri Tessier, Noémie Tessier, Jeanine File 2900 Froim and Malka Polak and their two children, Polish Jewish emigrés, were living in Paris when the war broke out. In 1941, Froim Polak was arrested and interned in the concentration camp at Pithiviers in the département of Loiret. He was one of 2,000 Jewish men aged 18-45 who were arrested and interned on May 14-15, 1941. Many Gypsies were also interned in the camp, but unlike the Jews, they were allowed to leave. Several of the prisoners’ wives came from Paris to demonstrate against this discrimination, but the local population remained indifferent. After a few weeks, Malka Polak discovered that Froim could be released if a villager in the area offered him a job. After many difficulties and unsuccessful attempts, Malka Polak met Henri Tessier, a gardener, and asked him to hire her husband as his helper. The Tessiers, who had six children, aged six to twenty, lived in the rural hinterland of Pithiviers. The eldest son had left home and crossed into the unoccupied zone to join the Resistance; the next eldest daughter, Jeanine, was seventeen at the time. Tessier was reluctant to assist Polak at first. His family was large and his house was too small to accommodate anyone else. About two days later, he realized that Malka Polak could not find work for Froim elsewhere. He pitied the young, desperate Jewish woman and decided to help save her husband. Tessier himself went to the Pithiviers concentration camp and offered to hire Polak as a laborer on his farm. Consequently, Polak was released. About two weeks later, camp guards searched for Polak to return him to the camp. Tessier, aware that this would consign Polak to deportation and mortal danger, said that his laborer had returned to the camp two days earlier. After the police left, Tessier rushed Polak to his octogenarian mother’s home, and left him there for several days. During this time, he built a specially designed hiding place with a rear exitinto the garden and a window that afforded a view of anyone coming or going. Polak remained for eleven months, until March 1942, when the townspeople began to whisper, “Tessier is hiding a Jew.” Tessier decided to move Polak to his brother-in-law’s home, in the département of Drôme, in the as-yet unoccupied southeastern part of the country. His daughter Jeanine disguised herself as a nurse and loaded Froim Polak, camouflaged as a patient, into an ambulance whose driver had been bribed. Shortly afterwards, she accompanied his wife and two small children in the same way. Several months later, after the great roundup in Paris, Jeanine went to Paris in order to extricate Malka Polak’s two sisters. Five other members of the Polak family and two small children were escorted south in a similar manner, and all survived the occupation. After the war, the Tessiers helped Froim Polak get back on his feet. The two families maintained a warm friendship. The Tessiers acted out of generosity, nobility of spirit, and sincere empathy, with no financial reward. On May 14, 1984, Yad Vashem recognized Henri Tessier, his wife, and their daughter Jeanine as Righteous Among the Nations.