Two Jewish sisters' fight to honor the couple who hid them during the Holocaust
Arlette Testyler often says she was born twice. First in 1933, in Paris, a year after her sister Madeleine. The second time was in Vendôme, in 1942. Their parents, Polish Jews, had come to France to work and start a family, believing they would be safe far from the pogroms already ravaging their homeland. In 1941, their father, Abraham Reiman, who had enlisted in the French army two years earlier, was arrested by the police after being summoned for an identity check. In 1942, he was deported and murdered at Auschwitz. On July 16, Arlette, her sister and their mother were also arrested by the French police and held in inhumane conditions at the Vélodrome d'Hiver stadium in Paris during the mass round-up that led to the arrest of nearly 13,000 people. "It was Dante's inferno," she often says.
They remained confined for three days before being transferred to the Beaune-la-Rolande camp, ahead of deportation to Poland. But, by a miracle unique to those tragic times, all three managed to escape and return to Paris before ending up in Vendôme, in central France, where many families had organized to hide Jewish children. It was there that Arlette and her sister found new life, hidden and saved, along with their mother.
On Monday, June 16, the town will host a most unusual ceremony. Jeanne and Jean Philippeau, born in 1913 and 1910 and who died in 1992 and 1993, will be honored by the State of Israel. Both will receive the highly prestigious title of Righteous Among the Nations, awarded by the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem and the Supreme Court of Israel. The couple will be honored for saving the lives of the two girls as well as a boy, Simon Windland, now dead, "without any personal gain," as specified by the French Committee for Yad Vashem – a prerequisite for the award.
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