de Lattre Johannes & Eva

Lattré, Eva de Lattré, Johannes de Eva de Lattré, born in 1902, was a childhood friend of Kläre Machost, the Jewish wife of an Aryan man. Having heard of the events of the Kristallnacht pogrom, Eva and her husband Johannes de Lattré (b. 1898) rushed to Duisburg to see how their Jewish friends had fared. They invited the Machosts and another Jewish couple, the Abramowiczes, to take temporary refuge in their home at Borth, a small village in the Lower Rhine. The two couples accepted the invitation and went into hiding at the de Lattré home in Borth. However, the Lattrés were betrayed by their Nazi neighbor, who denounced them to the local gendarmerie. Fortunately the policeman who was sent to inspect the house was none too keen on the job at hand and allowed himself to be deceived. Subsequently, de Lattré drove the Abramowicz couple to the Dutch border. Had the de Lattrés been discovered by the Nazi authorities, they would have ended up in a concentration camp for hiding Jews. On October 26, 1978, Yad Vashem recognized Johannes and Eva de Lattré as Righteous Among the Nations.