Jurquet Albert & Germaine (Gaich)

Jurquet, Albert Jurquet, Germaine Albert Jurquet directed the Jules Grévy Collège in Poligny (Jura), assisted by his wife Germaine. Albert had been in the 1914-1918 War and had lost an eye at Verdun. In 1942, the couple took in five Jewish boys at the school. Gilbert Cassin, a nephew of the respected lawyer and member of the Resistance, René Cassin, was one of them. The Jurquets ran a serious risk hiding the boy, for his uncle, who was on the air at Radio London, was very well known as a close associate of de Gaulle. The Cassin family, members of an old Jewish community, were living in Marseilles, and had fled to La Bourboule when the Germans invaded the southern zone. They subsequently made contact with Henri Meunier, a veteran of the 1914-1918 War and a comrade from the trenches of Fédia Cassin, Gilbert’s father. He went to fetch Gilbert and accommodated him in Poligny, enrolling him under the clandestine name of Gilou Richard. Jurquet’s son Jacques, married to a Jewish woman named Myriam Feigenbaum, was an evader from Forced Labor Service (STO), and was hidden in the nearby forests by the Resistance. The Jurquets greatly helped their in-laws by warning them of imminent raids and providing them a safe haven. Some of the other Jewish boys hiding at their school included Kurt Lévy, using the name Claude Laffont, the two Salomon brothers, under the name Sauvageot, and Hans Hirschberg, known as Jean Lang, an Alsatian name because he was of German origin. They had been placed at Poligny by the “Sixième,” the clandestine branch of the French Jewish Scouts (EIF). On December 26, 2005, Yad Vashem recognized Albert and Germaine Jurquet as Righteous Among the Nations.