Beginning in August 1941, Jews who were the victims of roundups were detained at the Drancy internment camp. Starting in December 1941, the sick were taken from the camp and transferred to the Rothschild Hospital (run by the Rothschild Foundation) under the supervision of the Germans and the police prefecture.
Resistance fighters tortured by the Nazi political police, the Gestapo, and patients from the Tourelles camp were also hospitalized at Rothschild. The brutal roundup of patients and their return to Drancy on the orders of Dannecker—a high-ranking Nazi official in charge of the “Jewish question”—and the registration of babies immediately after birth left the hospital staff in a state of distress.
Anti-Jewish persecution intensified in 1942 and 1943. Resistance efforts were quickly organized to keep patients—even those who had recovered—in the hospital: falsely alarmist diagnoses, unnecessarily aggressive treatments, or pointless surgeries.
Paulette Sliwka (Sarcey), a young Jewish communist activist with the M.O.I., was arrested, beaten by the Vichy police, and hospitalized at Rothschild.
She escaped from Drancy… temporarily: “[…] I have bruises, but I’m still standing. The Jews who examined me—Drs. Lobelsohn and Weismann—understood the situation and decided to operate on my appendicitis as a favor, the only way to keep me there longer […].”
But it was in the rescue of Jewish children that the Rothschild Hospital’s “network” proved most effective: newborns reported as stillborn or falsely declared dead were smuggled out of the hospital in baskets of dirty laundry.
Social worker Claire Heyman, who is leading the operation; pediatric resident Colette Brull-Ulmann (who, as a Jew, is allowed to practice only at Rothschild); and nurse Maria Edwards Errázuriz are particularly active. Claire Heyman hides the children in the morgue, an unguarded area. She has accomplices inside the hospital and contacts on the outside.
Many Jews, equipped with false identification papers and fake baptismal certificates, were taken in by the Œuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE) or the Eclaireurs israélites de France (EIF), which, with the help of priests, placed them in various convents.
But as the Nazis stepped up their surveillance, the Rothschild became, in a sense, a prison.
Sick adults and children are deported to extermination camps.
Hospital staff (administrative and medical) are arrested and deported.
Reference:
Colette Brull-Ulmann, 2021, *The Children of the Last Salvation*. Livre de poche.
