Rose-Helene Spreiregen
Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHNEIDER. Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record remarks from Rose-Helene Spreiregen, a holocaust survivor.
Never, as a young Jewish girl hiding in France during World War II, could I have possibly dreamed of standing where I am now. Never could I have imagined addressing democratically elected representatives, in a country where people can live freely, a country that I love.
My name is Rose-Helene Spreiregen. I was born in Paris in 1931 into a family that fled Poland in the late 1920s because of antisemitism. Little could they imagine what was to happen a decade later.
Germany invaded Western Europe in May 1940. France fell a month after, and Nazi occupation began immediately. Jews were ordered to register with the police, who became close collaborators with the occupiers. Anti-Jewish laws and acts of discrimination quickly followed. Jews could not go to restaurants, to movie theaters, not even parks. They could not own radios or telephones. They could not be out after 6:00 p.m. It got only worse.
In 1942, every Jewish person over six years old was issued three yellow Stars of David inscribed with the word ``JUIF'' (Jew in French). It had to be sewn on an outer garment. Jews could shop only one hour a day at a time when stores were mostly sold out of goods. On the Metro subway, they were restricted to the last car. They could not travel more than 17 miles from Paris.
I stopped going to school in July 1942 because Jewish children were pulled from their classrooms by collaborating police and deported with their families to Nazi concentration camps.
More than 13,000 Jews were arrested that same month, most were sent to their deaths. Luckily, my mother was warned by a sympathetic policeman. Immediately she went into hiding. She then obtained forged identity papers and, with the help of a smuggler, set out to cross the border from Nazi-occupied northern France into French-controlled southern France--so- called Vichy France--but still equally dangerous for Jews. Instead of helping her cross the border, the smuggler betrayed her, and she was arrested. She was then sent to Drancy, an infamous rail juncture and holding town just north of Paris. From there, its prisoners were transported to concentration or death camps.
Grandmother and I stayed hidden in my mother's apartment for a year, never leaving for fear of being arrested or worse. I went out alone to get food. Every day I stood in lines, unable to conceal my Star of David, and because of it, I was cursed as a ``dirty Jew.'' From our window, we saw other families being pulled from their apartments and hauled away in trucks.
In August 1943, grandmother decided we had to flee Paris. We obtained false identity papers with new names and equally false personal information. We departed from Paris on an overnight train that would pass through two border control checkpoints, the first under German control, the second under French. I decided to take charge for us since grandmother spoke with a thick Polish accent--a giveaway. I told her to pretend she was asleep. When the German soldiers came to check our papers, I asked them not to wake her. They complied. At the second checkpoint, controlled by the French, I made the same request. Miraculously it worked. We got through. In all those years of living in near unbearable fear, none had been more terrifying than those border passings. I couldn't stop shaking for hours after.
I was twelve years old.
We found our way to the small and remote mountain town of Voiron in east central France. My aunt and younger cousin had successfully made the same journey to a nearby town. Grandmother and I found a place to stay in what I recall as a warehouse. We had no furniture. but a kind neighbor gave us a mattress, a small cooking stove which helped keep us warm, and other utensils.
I found a job running a small grocery. I was paid meager wages. Grandmother mended clothing and bartered her wine rations for food. We scoured the nearby forest for chestnuts and firewood. My only warm dress, made from a blanket, was destroyed beyond use by mice.
Deliverance finally came with the liberation of Voiron in August 1944 by American soldiers, the ``greatest generation,'' the generation of many of your grandparents. They gave us crackers, chocolate, and, of all things, chewing gum, something I'd never known. But above all, they gave us freedom. Still, I had no knowledge of my mother's fate. I kept hoping she would come back. She never did. Later I learned what happened. At Drancy, she had volunteered to accompany a trainload of children to Auschwitz, 1,000 miles east, a horrific journey of several days and nights. They were packed into freight cars like animals. No water. No food. No sanitation. No windows. No place to sit let alone room to lie down. All this was in the heat of August. Upon arrival, all who survived the journey were murdered in gas chambers. Such was my mother's fate.
She was thirty-one years old.
It is always difficult for me to tell my story. But I am compelled to tell it because of the global surge in antisemitism, including here in the United States. While it is reassuring that our government--in your hands--is addressing it at the highest levels, it is troubling that it has to be addressed at all. It doesn't take much history to teach us that what starts with hatred of the Jewish people does not end there.
What are the conditions that nurture antisemitism? Ignorance. Intolerance. Indifference. Injustice. That is why Holocaust education is so vital. That is why this country must again lead this fight, as it has done for just causes so often and so nobly in the past.
That is my story.
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