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«Dear dad: they’re taking us to the Winter Velodrome, but let’s not write to each other now, because it’s not safe for us to stay here. A strong kiss and another from mom, your little daughter who remembers you a lot, “he said. Marie Jelen in the first of the seven letters that he wrote shortly following the most important raid that the Nazis carried out in France, once morest the Jews, during World War II, took place in Paris. She was addressed to her father, Izek, shortly following he was arrested with her mother, Estera, in the early hours of July 16, 1942.
Little Marie, who was just 10 years old, was one of 4,051 children arrested that day, along with 3,031 other men and 5,802 women.
In total 12,884 Jews, of which around 7,000 people were sent to the Winter Velodrome. Our protagonist was baptized “the French Anne Frank”, although her odyssey was not revealed until 2003, when the aforementioned letters came to light, which were studied by Mercedes de Vega for publication a year ago
‘An unknown story, Marie Jelen’ (Spindle).
The author spent five years investigating the short life of the little girl with the help of Serge Jelen, the brother that his father had with another woman when he became a widower. He this gave him the information he needed to fill in the gaps that hung over the journey of Marie, whose words in the first letter did not seem very alarming. Despite this, she and her mother spent several days at the velodrome without food or water and in deplorable sanitary conditions. But she was not wrong, because on the 19th both were sent to the Pithiviers camp. It was the beginning of a path of no return to hell.
“I have scarlet fever”
This prison camp located a hundred kilometers from Paris, in one of the suburbs of the city that gives it its name, was the first that the Nazis set up in France, along with the one in Beaune-la-Rolande, for the internment of Jews. On May 14, 1941, the first 3,710 were sent there. Sanitary conditions were also appalling. There was not even an infirmary to attend to the interns. Initially, they survived on meager food donations from the Red Cross, while each barracks, poorly ventilated and stiflingly hot in summer and bitterly cold in winter, crammed more than 120 people.
«Dear dad: I’m sick, I have scarlet fever, which is nothing serious, but it lasts a long time. I have to stay in bed for 40 days, the first few days I mightn’t eat, so they give us milk. I am in very good health. I have been sick for 18 days. It eats well, mashed potatoes, rice, noodles. A very strong kiss from your daughter who loves you », explained Marie in the second letter, before her mother was sent to Auschwitz eleven days following arriving in Pithiviers. She never saw her once more. Nor her father.
The author recounts that Icek and Estera left their native Poland in the 1920s. They arrived in Paris fleeing persecution, without imagining that they would find even greater repression in France, following the German invasion in 1940. Ali was born Marie and there the family suffered the laws once morest the Jews introduced by Hitler, which forced his father to close his tailor shop. She emigrated to the Ardennes to work in slavery conditions for an agricultural company that exploited the lands of occupied France, leaving her daughter and her wife in the French capital, without imagining that she would never see them once more.
The last letter
When Marie sent the following two letters, on August 27 and 29, 1942, her mother had already been murdered in Auschwitz, although she did not know of her whereregardings and referred to the most daily affairs of the camp: «Dear father: Excuse me for not writing before because in the infirmary there are children younger than me, and when the nurse and the lady who takes care of the sick children are out, the older ones have to take care of the smaller ones […]. The lady who takes care of us is very kind to me, she pampers us a lot. The food they give us is good, the only thing is that we cannot eat things with salt and if it is not sweet, it is not good. I remember you a lot, are you in good health? Me, when I get tired of being in bed all the time, I get up a little. I can’t think of anything else to tell you.”
In an extraordinary odyssey, Icek leaves the labor camp very worried following his daughter’s last letter, dated September 18, in which the end that awaits little Marie Jelen can already be glimpsed: «Dear dad: Try to get me out of here so I can be with you once more, because here I am running out of strength. I have lost a lot of weight and I am still sick. I have caught another disease, chicken pox. There are people who say that they are going to free children who are under 16 years old. I hope I get your answer as soon as possible. Keep up the good work, above all don’t get sick like I do. Don’t have a bad time like me, I start to cry every time I think of you. Your little daughter who loves you and sends you a very strong kiss».
When her father arrives in that Nazi-filled Paris, he confirms that neither his daughter nor his wife are there anymore. He also manages to reach Pithiviers without being arrested, where he does not find an answer to the whereregardings of his family either. Although he does not know it, his little Marie had been deported to Auschwitz, on September 21, in convoy number 35. She traveled to her final destination with 163 other children, who were especially vulnerable to the Holocaust. The Nazis labeled them “undesirable” or “dangerous” and regarded them as an indispensable part of the “racial struggle.”
balance of terror
That is why the Germans and their collaborators murdered approximately 1.5 million children. Of this, more than a million were Jews, like Marie Jelen, whom her father lost track of. She then fled to the south of France and arrived at Nontron, in the Dordogne, where she took refuge until the end of World War II. Over the years, he would end up rebuilding his life with another woman and having his son Serge, the same one who collaborated with De Vega in the reconstruction of his biography.
The most devastating balance of the Nazi extermination was made public in 2013 by the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, through the ‘Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos’ project. The result was a map of 42,500 concentration camps, ghettos and forced labor factories that caused between 15 and 20 million deaths or internments. Mostly Jews, but also members of other groups persecuted by Nazism, such as gypsies and homosexuals. “The figures are higher than we originally thought,” said the director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, Hartmut Berghoff.
However, the estimate from most studies done since 1945 was six million. That same year, the Institute of Jewish Affairs in New York already placed the dead between 5,659,600 and 5,673,100. A figure similar to the one that was revealed earlier by William Höttl, a former member of the SS, who stated that it was used by Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the final solution, in 1944. That would give a terrifyingly high percentage of child victims of the Holocaust.
