A child Holocaust survivor, who did not know she was Jewish – nor did the family hiding her – was the keynote speaker at the Yom HaShoah program at the Young Israel of Forest Hills on Wednesday, April 23. Around 45 attendees listened attentively.
Rosette Teitel believes the family never would have taken her in had they known she was Jewish, “but they got paid. They were perfectly happy to take the money. Nobody cared about me. I was a source of income. That was about it.”
Teitel’s mother was in the French Resistance, which may be how she found the farm. “You couldn’t be active (in the Resistance) and have a child to take care of.”
Born in Nancy, France, Teitel was a few weeks old when World War II started. At two and a half years old, she was in isolation at a hospital with the flu. Due to food rationing at the time, and her family living in a city, “it was deemed unwise” to stay with them. Food was much more plentiful on a farm.
The farm “was in the middle of nowhere,” surrounded by farms in the countryside. “It was really a nice setting, but I was a very unhappy little girl because nobody cared about me, nobody hugged me, nobody said anything sweet.” Only the nun, teaching inside the one-room schoolhouse, smiled at her once.
The boys at the schoolhouse “every so often” threw stones at other boys at the bottom of a hill. The teachers didn’t care and didn’t stop them. The reason they threw the stones was “because they were Protestant instead of Catholic.” That is why Huguenot Protestants took in and helped Jews, “because they knew what it meant to be Protestant in a Catholic section.”
Teitel was shy, had no friends, and cried every day into her man’s handkerchief. She fell asleep sucking on that handkerchief. To wean her off it, the farm mother offered money to give the handkerchief over to her. After three nights, Teitel gave up the handkerchief and got two coins. “I got this unique feeling of accomplishment. I did something positive. It was wonderful.”
The farm mother put the coins in an egg cup on a high shelf “for safekeeping.” The farm couple had three children. The youngest, a boy, “did not go to school because it seemed there was something wrong with his thinking.” The young boy said, “You think you got paid for stopping sucking your handkerchief?” He showed how there was no money in that egg cup.
“The devastation I felt took me many, many years to move past. And when I say many years, I’m talking about 40–50 years,” including therapy. She was on that farm for nearly five years.
Rosette Teitel, her uncles, grandparents, and mother, who separated from her husband, all moved to Marseilles, France, after the war. It was there that Teitel learned that she was Jewish.
While walking at the edge of the Red Light District, Rosette and her mother saw red lingerie in a store window. Rosette said, “We can’t look at that. The devil will get us.” Her mother explained when they got home, “We don’t believe in the devil because we are Jews.” Teitel was shocked. “No, we can’t be Jews. We don’t have horns.”
Teitel’s mother applied, took a test, and became a Bilingual Typist for the United Nations in New York. The family came in 1946. After six months of working, her mother said of the UN, “It’s full of anti-Semites.”
During a question-and-answer period after her presentation, Teitel said she loved learning about Judaism at the Hillcrest Jewish Center Hebrew School after coming from France. She also got involved with Young Judaea and Young Hadassah.
“I didn’t know there was a Holocaust going on while I lived on the farm,” said the soft-spoken Rosette Teitel in a private interview. Teitel “never asked a lot of questions” to her mother about why this farm was chosen or about anything else. She never got to. Her mother died suddenly when Rosette was seven years old.
Teitel said that Holocaust survivors didn’t talk about their experiences after the war. It was not until people started denying the Holocaust ever happened that survivors spoke up to say, “I lived through it.”
Teitel began her presentation by saying that she never considered herself a Holocaust survivor because she didn’t go to a concentration camp, “but after a number of years, I realized, yes, I am a survivor. I describe myself as a hidden child.”
Rabbi Elisha Friedman of the Young Israel of Forest Hills spoke about the agony parents must have felt when their children were ripped away by Nazis. A scene from the 2024 movie about the Holocaust, “Bardejov,” crystallized his feelings. It was shown at the Kristallnacht Commemoration at Congregation Machane Chodosh last year.
“It showed parents running around trying to save their children. The kids are scared, petrified out of their minds.” It hit Rabbi Friedman “in a new way, as a parent with kids around that age… I know what I would do to protect my kids, to make sure that they don’t experience that kind of terror.”
Rabbi Friedman said T’hilim 130 and 121 for the victims of the Holocaust, as well as for the hostages and soldiers currently in Gaza. “We have ongoing suffering and tragedy right now.”
Rabbi Yossi Mendelson of Congregation Machane Chodosh chanted the Keil Malei Rachamim.
Rabbi Zalman Mergui of the Young Israel of Forest Hills TSM spoke with Rosette Teitel at length in French after the program. She is now a retired high school teacher living in Oakland Gardens, Queens. Rosette Teitel requested not to be photographed.
By David Schneier
