Raillon René & Rose (Loiseau)

Raillon, René & Rose During the war, René and Rose Raillon lived in Montélimart (Drôme), where they managed a farm. In 1942, they gave shelter to a Jewish woman, Gabrielle Kahn. Gabrielle had lived with her husband Salli and their two sons, Roger and Marcel, in Luxembourg until the outbreak of WWII. In 1941, they were forced to leave Luxembourg and found a safer place to stay in Ancône, a small village in the Drôme department. There, Salli and his sons worked in the fields until the end of 1942, when police arrived armed with an arrest order for Salli. Luckily he wasn’t home, but the Kahn family immediately understood the implications and decided to go into hiding. They first stayed with M. Bonnet, one of the local farmers they had befriended. After the first night, Bonnet asked the Raillons if they would be willing to help Gabrielle, while Salli and her sons went underground and joined the resistance. René and Rose immediately offered a safe shelter to Gabrielle. Although she had a false identity card, if Gabrielle had been discovered at their home, the Raillons would have been in great danger. Nevertheless they didn’t hesitate to help the Jewish refugee, and kept her safe until liberation. They told their neighbors that she was a distant cousin from northern France. After the war, the relationship between the two families grew even stronger, and René and Rose even went to visit the Kahns in Luxembourg. On July 20, 2011, Yad Vashem recognized René and Rose Raillon as Righteous Among the Nations.