Roux Marie-Thérèse

Roux, Mother Marie-Thérèse Hertel, Sister Jeanne File 3028 Mother Marie-Thérèse Roux was the Mother Superior of a convent not far from Toulon (Var). The Samuels, a couple with two children, aged seven and three, their grandmother, and their aunt, fled Paris around 1940, and settled in Toulon. They chose Toulon because M. Samuel’s parents lived in the nearby town of La Garde with his sister and her family. In September 1943, a messenger told Samuel that his mother needed him. He immediately went to La Garde, where Germans who had come to arrest the family captured him. Only his young sister managed to flee to neighbors, who took her to one of her teachers, Germaine Teillard (q.v.), who lived near La Garde. Teillard quickly told the Samuels in Toulon that M. Samuel had been arrested and then delivered all of them to her parents’ home in La Garde. The two Samuel children and M. Samuel’s young sister remained with Germaine Teillard, and the three women were given refuge in Marie-Thérèse Roux’s convent. Mother Roux and her deputy, Jeanne Hertel, looked after the three women devotedly and eased their plight in every way possible. The Germans occasionally entered and searched the convent, and in such cases, the sisters protected the women by moving them from room to room through secret passageways. Later, when the Teillards discovered that the Germans were about to search their house, they rushed the three children to the convent, where they spent the next two weeks reunited with the rest of their family. When the Germans became suspicious, the sisters sent them all to the Teillards’ house. Because this hiding place had become unsafe, the sisters provided the entire family with forged identification and ration cards obtained through contacts with the police, and escorted them by train to a convent in Montpellier. There, too, the Samuels were discovered and had to move again. At the end of the war, they were in Langogne (Lozère). The women and children wereexhausted, and one of the children had typhoid fever. When Mother Marie-Thérèse heard, she quickly dispatched a member of the religious community with food, medicine, and instructions for special care. Later one of the survivors wrote: “Never, at any moment during this period, was there a question of money. After the war, we were all very attached to one another, and they took part in all of our joys and our sadnesses. Both of them said that we were among the people closest to their hearts.” On November 13, 1984, Yad Vashem recognized Mother Marie-Thérèse Roux and Sister Jeanne Hertel as Righteous Among the Nations.