Wagner Antoinette ; Son: Marcel

Edmond-Wagner, Antoinette Edmond, Marcel-Henri File 6048 After the great roundup of Jews in Paris in July 1942, the Nodel and Itzikowitz families fled to Cusset, a suburb of Lyons. A year later, they again felt threatened and searched for another hiding place. Nodel, who liked fishing, had made the acquaintance of the keeper of the locks on the Jonage Canal, next to the Rhône River. He asked her to help him, and she referred him to her friend, Antoinette Edmond, who owned a small house on the bank of the nearby Rize Canal. She and her son Marcel-Henri used the house only on weekends and holidays. Nodel immediately contacted Edmond, who gave him the house keys without questions or preconditions. She did not ask the Nodels and the Itzikowitzes to pay rent. Edmond only asked them not to use the oven during the day, because smoke from the chimney might attract the neighbors’ attention. Edmond and her son Marcel-Henri, a student, came on the weekends, so that their presence would explain the two families’ cooking, cleaning and laundering. The Edmonds grew vegetables in the garden next to the house, which improved the “tenants’” diet, and Marcel-Henri cycled from the city to deliver food to them two or three times a week. The Nodels and the Itzikowitzes lived this way for eight months, from January 1944 until the liberation in August 1944. In early 1944, the region was rife with denunciations and systematic searches for hidden Jews, but the rescuers did not realize how great a risk they had taken until after the liberation. On April 12, 1994, Yad Vashem recognized Antoinette Edmond-Wagner and her son Marcel-Henri as Righteous Among the Nations.