Marche Pierre ; Son: Pierre

Marche, Pierre Marche, Pierre (his son) File 4934 Moïse Abinun, born in Sarajevo, immigrated to France in 1936, with his wife Mathilde and their two young children. He settled in Lyons and worked as a tailor in Pierre Marche’s sportswear factory. In November 1942, when Lyons was included in the occupied zone and the danger to Jews increased, the Abinuns often took refuge with neighbors and co-workers of Moïse to avoid the arrests. One morning in the middle of March 1944, two Gestapo agents pounded on the Abinuns’ door. Fortunately, Mathilde had gone out shopping with her daughters. The neighbors, seeing what was happening, ran to warn Mathilde. She rushed to the factory with her daughters. Frightened, Moïse Abinun confided in his employer, Pierre Marche, who offered to shelter the Abinun family in an empty room on the fifth floor of the factory. Marche did not charge rent, provided basic furniture, and installed a sewing machine so that M. Abinun could continue to work. Marche’s son, twenty-year-old Pierre, erased the rubber-stamped word Juif from Abinun’s foreign identity card, changed his name from Moïse to Maurice and his father’s name from Samuel to Famueli. He did not touch the name “Abinun” because it did not sound Jewish in either French or German. Pierre Jr. also brought food to the Abinuns, because they did not dare leave the factory. In late March 1944, the girls were sent to another hiding place, which the Marches found, in Messimi, thirty kilometers from Lyons; the parents remained hidden in the factory until the city was liberated. On June 13, 1991, Yad Vashem recognized Pierre Marche and his son Pierre as Righteous Among the Nations.