Morin Lucie

Morin, Lucie Berthe File 2337 In the summer of 1942, Lucie Morin was the concierge in a small apartment hotel, on the rue de Pali-Kao, in the twentieth arrondissement of Paris. Most of the day, she spent in her little ground-floor room, watching people enter and leave the hotel. Sometimes she helped clean the tenants’ apartments, including that of the Kaminsky family, Polish Jews who had come to Paris in 1936. Dr. Zvi Kaminsky, who had become blind some time earlier, lived in the hotel with his wife and their three-year-old daughter. As Morin well knew, other Jews also lived in the hotel. In July 1942, shortly before the great roundup in Paris, she heard rumors about impending arrests of Jews. She immediately assembled the Jews in her hotel, about fifteen in all, and urged them to squeeze into a small cubicle behind her reception room at the entrance. Morin positioned a large closet in front, to hide the cubicle. She brought food that she purchased on the black market, and two or three times a day she moved the heavy piece of furniture to hand the hidden Jews food and water. For three days and three nights after the night of the large roundup, Morin did not allow gendarmes to search the hotel, stating that she had a note from the police attesting that there were no Jewish guests there. Several days after the large roundup, when the danger had subsided, Morin released everyone from the cramped cubicle. Most escaped to the southern zone. Only the Kaminskys remained, because the blind man was afraid to take the risk. It would have been too dangerous to remain in the hotel, so the concierge took them into her own private apartment situated nearby. She fed them without payment. The Kaminskys then discovered that someone had informed on them, and they fled to a hiding place in Argenteuil that Morin found for them not far from Paris. She left her job as the concierge of the hotel, and came to live near them. The Kaminskys had to leave their young daughter with thenanny in Paris, and Morin brought news of their daughter to her parents. After the liberation and until the late 1950s, the Kaminskys were in almost daily contact with their rescuer. Then they immigrated to Israel, and Morin moved away. They did not resume contact until the early 1980s, when the Kaminskys’ daughter went to France to look for the brave woman to whom she owed her life. On July 26, 1982, Yad Vashem recognized Lucie Berthe Morin as Righteous Among the Nations.