Saving the Children, 1938–1945

The exhibition “Saving the Children, 1938–1945” was planned by OSE – Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants (“Children’s Aid Society”) and is presented in conjunction with the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum. It describes the paths of ten Jewish children who were hidden in France and rescued during the Second World War. The period of occupation and the Vichy French government’s collaboration with the Nazi regime, is disgracefully infamous. The stories of Jewish children hidden and rescued by underground organizations remain largely unknown. This is the saga that the OSE Society and the GFH Museum have chosen to tell, and in so doing give voice to those rescued children, orphans of the Holocaust.

In describing the routes of these children who were offered protection by OSE in its residential-educational homes and then were hidden by other institutions or private individuals until the war’s end, the exhibition “Saving the Children, 1938–1945” also highlights the activities of the rescuers, who belonged to several resistance organizations. These hidden Holocaust orphans, the children whose stories are brought to you here, are grandparents today. They survived the Holocaust and built their lives anew after the war. They re-learned how to live and raised families throughout the world: in France and all of Europe, but also in Israel, the U.S.A. and even Australia. The story of their survival and building new lives bears a message of hope.