Hiding on the Farm

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The climate of Paris was changing because of the increasing number of Jews being arrested, it was time for Leo and his brother to go into hiding. Leo’s mother had arranged for her sons to be hidden on two separate farms in the town of Evron. (Abrami, 99)

Leo was sent to a farm in Sainte Gemmes le Robert that was on the outside of Evron and was owned by Monsieur Etienne and Madame Bardou. (Abrami, 100) Leo’s mother would pay them for taking in her son and feeding him while he was at the farm. While on the farm, Leo maintained that he was a Catholic boy because he had the baptismal certificate that his mother had received from the priest. For the most part Leomaintained a low profile by sleeping out in the stable and helping out with the daily chores that were on the farm.

While Leo escaped the persecution by the Nazis and French government because of hiding on the farm the same cannot be said for the Jews living in Paris. “Vichy France bears an important part of the responsibility for this disaster, as the records of both French and German governments make clear. The deportations from France from 1942 to 1944 were made possible not only by direct French assistance but also by the course of earlier persecution…” (Marrus and Paxton, xi) It was known that with the Germans fighting the Soviet Union and the Allied powers in the west that the persecution of Jews was intensifying. The quota system that had been put in place for how many Jews needed to be deported on a daily basis was continuing to be set at a higher rate.