Milelli Louis

Milelli, Louis Walter and Hilde Lévi fled from Nazi persecutions in Germany, and lived in Dijon (Côte d’Or) with their only son, Jacques (b. 1939). With the German occupation of France in 1941, Walter decided to move his family to Lyon (Rhônes- Alpes), where he believed they would be safer. But in November 1942, the Germans invaded the south of France as well, and the Lévis were forced to go into hiding. Soon, they decided to leave Lyon altogether, as the arrests there had become more frequent. They planned to move to an isolated village in the southwest of France, but in order to do so, they needed formal papers from the army in addition to the identity papers they already had. He turned to his neighbor Louis Milelli, a captain in the French army, for help. Milelli produced a falsified military certificate for Walter, which stated that they had served in the same regiment in the army. This allowed Walter and his family to flee and hide until the end of the war. If the ruse had been discovered, Louis and his wife would have risked deportation and even death. Nevertheless, he acted out of humanity and patriotism, putting his own life in danger, in order to save the Lévi family. The two families lost touch after the war until recently, when Jacques Lévi found the Millelis' grandson after 62 years. Hilde Lévi, who had written a diary during the war that mentioned the courageous wartime act of Louis, was overjoyed when she heard that contact had been renewed with her rescuer's family. On June 20, 2006, Yad Vashem recognized Louis Milelli as Righteous Among the Nations.