Émilie LEVY

« There are no Jews in Ukraine. Nowhere – Poltava, Kharkov, Kremenchug, Borispol, Iagotin – in any large city, in any of the hundreds of small towns or thousands of villages, nowhere will you see little girls with their dark eyes brimming with tears; nor will you hear the sorrowful voice of an old woman; nor see the dirty face of a starving baby. Everywhere is silent, everywhere is peaceful. An entire people has been savagely massacred (…) And there is no one left in Kazary to complain, no one to explain [what happened], no one to cry. »

Vassili Grossman, Carnets de guerre, de Moscou à Berlin, 1941-1945 (War diaries, from Moscow to Berlin, 1941-1945), Paris, 2007

 

Émilie was born in Nantes, in the Loire-Atlantique department of France, on December 17, 1861. Her father, Samuel Szczupak (1823-1892), was Polish, and her mother, Esther Levy (1822-1914), was French. Her parents, who had been married since 1849, lived at 28 quai de la Fosse, in a commercial area of Nantes. The building is no longer there, having been replaced by the Nantes multimedia library. Émilie, who was the last of four children, came into the world at 1 a.m. in the family home.

 

 

Marriage and starting a family in Paris

On October 5, 1880, Émilie married Maurice Levy. She was 19 at the time. They couple went on to have four children. Madeleine, René, André and Albert, all of whom were born in Paris. The couple probably moved there after the wedding. By researching the birth and death records of both her husband and her children, we have been able to reconstruct Émilie Levy’s life story.

The couple set up home at 6, rue Amsterdam in Paris. It was here that Madeleine was born on August 2 1881, followed by René on January 15, 1884. Maurice Levy was a jeweler at the time and Émilie did not go out to work. They may have had a second home at 16, avenue de la Princesse in Le Vésinet, in the Yvelines department of France, as it was there that Émilie gave birth to André Lévy on May,1886. In 1887, Émilie and Maurice had their fourth and last child, Albert, who was born on December 5 in their apartment in rue Amsterdam in Paris.

 

The Dreyfus affair in Nantes

While Émilie was living in Paris, her father, who was still living in Nantes, fell victim to an attack that she must have been aware of. In 1898, the year in which Emile Zola published his famous letter “J’accuse” in the French newspaper L’Aurore, anti-Semitic marches and slogans were sweeping through Brittany. The Dreyfus affair (1894-1906) hit Émilie’s Jewish family hard. On January 17, 15,000 people marched near rue Crébillon. On the 18th, Samuel Szczupak was targeted. His store, which was called Au Pilotin, was looted (French newspaper article about this). He only survived because the police intervened ¹. What did Émilie think about what was happening? How did she feel about the anti-Semitic abuse that her father suffered?

 

 

The loss of so many family members

In 1904, Émilie and Maurice moved to rue Bernoulli in Paris. It was there that they met with another tragedy: the death of their son René at the age of 20. A few years later, death struck again. At 3 a.m. on April 17, 1912, Maurice died at the age of 59. By this time, the couple were living at 13, rue de Navarin in Paris. Then, in 1935, her son Albert died at his home at 51, rue Damrémont in Paris. Albert had a wife, Cécile, and a son, Raymond ². According to Albert’s death certificate, Émilie Levy was living on the same street at the time, so was probably living with Albert and his family.

Arrest and deportation

Émilie’s last known address was 48 bis, rue des Haies in Paris. She was arrested on the night of July 7-8, 1944. At around 3 a.m., two uniformed German policemen and a plainclothes French officer burst into her apartment. She was arrested and taken to Drancy camp, where she was interned for 23 days. When she arrived there, the authorities searched her and confiscated the 110 francs that she was carrying, as mentioned on this receipt from Drancy camp. A Mrs. Falize, a concierge who lived at 52 rue des Haies contacted André Levy later that morning to tell him that his mother had been arrested ³.

On July 31, 1944, Émilie Levy was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau on Convoy 77. The original deportation transport list has two mistakes in it ⁴.

Émilie was not born in 1901, but in 1861. Her maiden name is also misspelled as Szezwyak. By the time the convoy arrived and the deportees got off the train onto the bahnrampe, inside Birkenau, 82-year-old Émilie’s fate was already sealed. She walked along the platform towards the killing center behind the concentration camp, where she was murdered in the gas chambers. Her official date of death is August 5, 1944.

Émilie Szczupak has all but disappeared. There are no photos of her. All that remains is this signature:

 

Retracing Émilie Levy’s life story has raised a number of questions. After the war, two of her children, Madeleine and André, requested that Émilie be granted the status of deportee politique, or political deportee, meaning that she was deported for political reasons.

Madeleine, who was married to Léon Rossienski, died in 1964 in Clichy-la-Garenne in the Hauts-de-Seine department of France. Her husband was arrested and then deported on June 23, 1944. He was killed in the gas chambers at Birkenau five days later. Her daughter, Sonia, who was 25, met the same fate.

André Lévy was married to Elise Gabrielle Delahaut. He died in 1980 in Sevran, in the Seine-Saint-Denis department.

Both of them therefore managed to escape the genocidal Nazi ideology and avoid being deported. Where did they go? How did they survive? We found no records to shed any light on this.

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Notes and references

1. Claude Toczé and Annie Lambert, Les Juifs en Bretagne (V^e-XX^esiècles), (PUR, Rennes, 2006, chapter 6: À la fin du XIX^esiècle, l’antisémitisme en Bretagne pp. 81-108.
2. According to the 1926 census, Paris municipal archives, ref. D2M8 296 and the 1931 census, Paris municipal archives, ref. D2M8 441.
3. File on Émilie Szczupak, Victims of Contemporary Conflicts Archives Division of the Ministry of Defense Historical Service, in Caen, Normandy, LEVY Émilie, 21 P 477 59633954.
4. The original deportation convoy list, Shoah Memorial, Paris