Forestier Louis

Forestier, Louis Louis Forestier, a teacher by profession, was appointed director of the children’s home in the village of Lavercantière (Lot) in 1943. The Château de Lavercantière was a 14th-century castle that had been converted to a children’s home in 1939, initially to accept refugee children from civil war-torn Spain. The home received support from the US-based Mennonite Church. Following a request from the Children’s Relief Organization (OSE), the home had also begun to take in Jewish children released from the Rivesaltes camp. Among the children who found shelter at Lavercantière was Charlotte Berger (later Grenèche) who was born in Cologne, Germany in 1937. Her father, Avraham Jacob Berger had moved from Poland to Germany, where he met and married Charlotte’s Romanian-born mother Zirl. Berger became a scrap metal dealer in Cologne, but with the ever-increasing antisemitism and persecution, the family fled Germany in 1939, lived in Belgium for a year, and then arrived in France in 1940, settling in Brive-la-Gaillarde. When her father went to work elsewhere, Charlotte and her mother were interned in the Rivesaltes detention camp. Shortly after their arrival at the camp, Zirl was deported to Auschwitz via Drancy, never to return. The OSE took Charlotte out of Rivesaltes, and in 1943 sent her to the children's home in Lavercantière, where she remained until 1945. Charlotte later recalled that she never lacked for anything, and activities at the children's home were varied and numerous. Her father even managed to visit her on occasion. When warnings of impending searches by German soldiers or French militiamen were received, all the Jewish children were sent into hiding; the Chateau’s staff as well as the villagers protected their secret vigorously. Another child who sheltered at the Château de Lavercantière was Alice Radzyner. Radzyner's family had settled in France in the 1930s, and Alice was born in 1939. In 1940, her father volunteered forthe army and was sent to the Ardennes, where he was wounded and evacuated to a hospital in Toulouse. In late 1940, her mother left Paris with Alice and settled in Montpellier, where her husband eventually joined her. In 1942, the Radzyners’ second daughter was born. With the threat of arrest, the family fled to Marvejols, where, in 1943 they had a son. After once again evading arrest, they returned to Montpellier and took refuge in a boarding house run by Suzanne Babut*. At this point, Alice's parents decided it would be best if their older daughter were accepted in the children’s home in Lavercantière. She arrived at the home in the spring of 1944, and remained there until the following summer. Years later, Alice (by then Pichon) recalled that for many years she had blocked the memory of her time in Lavercantière, because she had felt abandoned by her parents. One day, however, while listening to the radio, she heard the announcer ask, “Where were you on May 8, 1945?” Suddenly her mind flooded with memories of the children’s home, the other children, the food they ate, the need they often had to hide in the forest, and other events. Alice went in search of other children that had hidden at Lavercantière, and together they turned to Yad Vashem to request that Louis Forestier be recognized for his efforts to rescue Jewish children during the war. On October 19, 2009, Yad Vashem recognized Louis Forestier as Righteous Among the Nations.