The Promise

This book is the chronicle of a family's survival: my mother and my mother-in-law struggles and miracle survival during WWII in France. The stories told in this book stem from a promise I made to my mother, Ren e Holzer-Englander-Besnainou, in 1977 when I was only 13 and she was losing her battle against breast cancer at the young age of 41. At a tender age, from four to eight years old, she lived through a terrifying and inexplicable ordeal provoked by the willful blindness of a government gone mad. She was rescued thanks to the miraculous intervention of simple and courageous people who listened to their conscience and challenged the established order, often at the cost of their own lives. In 1940, about 330,000 Jews lived in France. Three-fourths of them survived thanks to the exemplary altruism of the French people. This book pays homage to them. Every story and location, as well as most of the dates and names, are completely true albeit slightly romanticized in order to add texture and readability to this novelized history.