PARIS – Danielle Mosse doesn’t know how old she was when the sisters of Sion hid her in what was then a boarding school, today converted into the school Nuestra Señora de Sión (Our Lady of Sion), meters from the Luxembourg Gardens. Danielle was born in late 1937 and was here for five or six months, sometime between 1938 and 1943. There are no files because, given the danger of the time, nobody wrote anything. “The only evidence I have is that I’m alive,” whispers Danielle, who lost both parents in concentration camps. She was adopted by her uncles, and her brother went to live with their grandparents. She grew up in Vosgos, northeast of France, and came to Paris to study, she became an English teacher, had a son and now has two grandchildren. Her son insists her to tell her story to her grandchildren, so they know and learn, but this petite grandmother with modern look believed that you can’t tell everything. “We don’t want. It is an injury that never goes away. We often loose to the cowardice of not talking. The past is always here”, she says.
Danielle lived a long time in a sort of denial and discomfort, until persuaded by friends who went through a similar experience and decided to resume contact. That momentum carried her back to the school a few weeks ago and be present during the ceremony in which the institution was honored as “house of life” by The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, an NGO founded by Argentine Baruch Tenembaum and now chaired by Eduardo Eurnekian whose mission is to preserve the heritage of those who helped the victims of Nazi persecution. The Plaque “House of Life”, which identifies and commemorates all those convents, monasteries, churches and schools that served as shelter during World War II, arrives for the first time to France, after Rome and London. Danielle observed as it is placed between two photographs: portraits of Sister Marie-France and Pope Francis.
The ceremony is particularly important in a country where anti-Semitic incidents increased 84% between January and May compared with the first five months of last year according to the latest data from the Protection of the Jewish Community (SPCJ), a body working in collaboration with the French Interior Ministry and census complaints of anti-Semitic acts or threats. They were 508 in the first half. Here the experts agree that the classic anti-Semitism in France came mostly from the far-right parties and old vichists, with a new type of anti-Semitism linked to extreme left and the Islamists. And with two novelties: anti-Semitism within the black population, with the idea that the Jews are responsible for the slave trade and that want to monopolize the historical suffering; and the Internet, where there is the belief that everything can be said and expressed without limits, and that in this context the Jews are a limit to freedom of expression. The French government presented in mid-April a plan to combat racism and anti-Semitism provided with 100 million euros over three years.
