Cécile ALLOUCHE

The biography you are about to read was written by Marine Casalini, Valentin Regourd, Katerina Jerabek and Arwen Leroy, a group of 11th grade students at the Val d’Argens high school in Le Muy, in the Var department of France. The project was carried out during the 2023-2024 school year and supervised by Myriam Lequimener, their history and geography teacher.

Photo: Identity photo of Cécile as a young woman
@Mémorial de la Shoah

Through online research and with the help of Mr. Jean Laloum, we managed to trace Huguette Binesti, the daughter of Henriette Allouche (née Bouskila) and the sister of Cécile Delugin (née Allouche). She then put us in touch with Monique Delugin, her niece, who is Henriette’s granddaughter and Cécile’s daughter.

We would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to them for all their help, both in providing us with a wealth of information and in working with the students at our school.

We based our research on records from the Shoah Memorial in Paris, the French Defense Historical Service and the National Resistance Museum in Champigny website.

This is the biography of Cécile Delugin, née Allouche. Her mother Henriette Allouche’s biography is also available on the Convoy 77 website.

Cécile was born on May 3, 1928 in Constantine, in Algeria. She was the eldest daughter of Ouraïda Henriette Allouche, née Bouskila, and Lucien Khalfallah Allouche, a painter and decorator. Her sister Eliane was born on May 6, 1934, followed by another, Huguette, on May 24, 1937.

In late 1937, the family moved to Paris. They initially lived on Rue des Jardins Saint-Paul, and then moved to 25 Rue des Écouffes. Cécile went to high school, while her sisters Huguette and Éliane enrolled in classes in the Marais district, run by a nun, Sister Agnès, who was to be a great help to them a few years later.

The family was not unduly worried in the early days of the war. Lucien was called up in 1939 but was demobilized soon after the armistice. When the Germans occupied France, he found work wherever he could. On October 7, 1940, the Vichy government repealed a law known as the Crémieux Decree, which had granted French citizenship to Jews in Algeria. As a result, the family became French “subjects,” which put them on a par with all the other people living who lived in the French colonies. At the same time, the government introduced a series of measures aimed at the Jewish population: they had to take part in a census, for example, and their identity papers were stamped. French Jewish families such as Cécile’s became caught up in a web of new rules and regulations. The only glimmer of hope for the family came in January 1942, when Gérard, the youngest child, was born.

One day in 1943, while Cécile was at school, two police officers, one French and one German, called at the family home. They opened a very thick ledger, some two feet long, and proceeded to question the family. At the end, just as they were leaving, the French police officer told Henriette to hide the children, and fast. When she got home from school, Cécile was told that the family was going to have to split up and conceal their true identities by means of forged identity cards. At five o’clock in the morning, a nun in dressed in regular clothes came to collect the younger girls (who, at that point, had no idea that she was actually a nun). Huguette was five and a half and Eliane three years her senior. The nuns at the Notre-Dame de Sion convent in Paris then took them in and kept them hidden.

The Yad Vashem memorial center has awarded the title of “Righteous Among the Nations” to a total of seven nuns from the Notre-Dame de Sion order in recognition of their role in saving Jews during the Second World War in cities as far apart as Paris, Grenoble, Antwerp and Rome. Huguette clearly remembers Sister Agnes, whose name is inscribed on the Wall of Names in Israel. Sister Agnès not only played a significant role in history, but also in Huguette’s life. Shortly after their father died and their mother and older sister were deported, Huguette and Eliane were moved to a convent near Saint-Omer in the Pas-de-Calais department of France. They travelled by train, which took almost all day, and were profoundly affected by an incident that took place soon after they arrived. They did not know at that point what had happened to their parents. They only found out that their father had died when a nun scolded them for making too much noise in the convent gymnasium, telling them: “You should be praying for your father, who has just died”.
Huguette remembers that their little brother, who was placed with a nanny because the convent did not take in boys, was often neglected and not allowed to go out for walks because he was too boisterous (much like most children at that age). He had to sit in a high chair all day. His sisters went to see him every Sunday and they would all cry. When they got back to the convent, Sister Agnes, unlike the Mother Superior, would comfort them when they were overcome with sorrow.

After they found places where the youngest children would be safe, Cécile’s parents found somewhere for themselves and Cécile to hide. They went to stay with a family in Saint-Cloud, on the western outskirts of Paris. Henriette did the cooking, while Lucien was the gardener and handyman. As for Gérard, who had bandy legs, a friend of the family took him in and had him admitted to the Rothschild Hospital for an operation. He had to stay there for quite some time, with his legs in plaster. On July 22, 1944, when Cécile was on her way to visit him in hospital, she was arrested just as she was leaving the subway station. Unfortunately, she had a note of her parents’ address with her. The French police went to 8 rue de Garches in Saint Cloud and arrested Henriette, Lucien and also the family they were staying with. Henriette and Lucien were held in the police station for three days. They were then transferred to a building on Rue des Saussaies where the Gestapo interrogated people. The people who had kept them hidden in their home were shot. On July 26, Lucien was tortured and then thrown out of a window, and died of his injuries. That very same day, Cécile spotted her mother as she arrived in Drancy camp. On July 31, 1944, both mother and daughter were deported to Auschwitz on Convoy 77.

There were so many deportees on the train, all crammed in together, and Cécile was so afraid that she clung so hard to her mother that she dug her nails into her shoulder. When at last they got off the train after an arduous three-day journey, they were beaten with truncheons. Henriette, who was deemed unable to work, was taken straight to the gas chambers and murdered. Cécile, however, was selected for forced labor an sent into the camp.

We know very little about what happened to Cécile in the camps, other than that she was transferred from Auschwitz to the Kratzau camp. There she worked in weapons factory, and had to endure malnutrition, unhygienic living conditions, epidemics and exhausting, repetitive work. According to Huguette, the only reason Cécile was able to survive all the awful things that happened to her was because she was so young. She must also have crossed paths with the well-known French deportee, Simone Veil, as they were both in the same camp and worked in the weapons factory at around the same time.

The Russian army liberated the Kratzau camp on May 9,1945, after which Cécile was repatriated to the Mézières reception center, where she arrived on June 2, 1945. After returning home, she went to see her mother’s family and tried to tell them what has happened to her, but nobody believed her. They thought she was crazy. Cecile’s uncle, her mother’s brother, even said to her: “I would never have come back without my mother”. Not only did her own family refuse to believe her, but hardly anyone else did anything to help either. The Red Cross, which had moved into a building on Rue des Saussaies that the Nazis had used just a few months earlier, would not take Cécile in, even though she was sick.

Despite her ordeal, Cécile managed to get her life more or less back on track. She found a job as a seamstress and a place to stay in the 12th district of Paris. She also discovered that her brothers and sisters were still alive and living in Saint-Omer. Not long after she got back to France, she met Michel Delugin. Michel was born on August 23, 1927, in Libourne, in the Gironde department of France. He was a member of a Resistance group in the Puy-de-Dôme department and then in the Lot department, where he joined the Francs-tireurs et partisans (FTP), an armed Resistance movement. The French Communist party officially founded the FTP in 1942, although it had actually been in existence since the end of 1941. Soon after the end of the war, he found a job with the French postal and telecommunications service (PTT) where he later became a General Confederation of Labor trades union leader. Cécile and Michel, although they were barely twenty years old, were married on February 4, 1950 in Rodez, in the Aveyron department of France. They then managed to reclaim Cécile’s parents’ old apartment, which had been ransacked, despite the door having been sealed up during the war. Cécile went on to find some of her family’s curtains in the next-door neighbor’s apartment and her mother’s casserole dish at another neighbor’s.

One day, when they were chatting amongst themselves, Michel asked Cécile if she had any brothers or sisters. “Yes,” she replied, “they are staying in a convent up north, in the Pas-de-Calais department”. Michel said that they should go to fetch them and they would raise them as their own children, so in May, Cécile set off to pick up her brother and sisters. She arrived just as a procession dedicated to the Virgin Mary was taking place. It was a horrible experience: it reminded her that she had been deported simply because she was Jewish. Huguette asked her if their mother was going to come back. Cécile had to tell her that she was not. The couple then took in Huguette, Éliane and Gérard. However, Cécile was still very tired and weak after everything she had been through, and found that she was no longer up to raising her brother and sisters. Michel therefore placed them in a children’s home in Malmaison, not far from where they lived. The siblings were thus able to spend time together every Sunday. Huguette still feels that Michel Delugin was an extraordinary man, given that he took on the guardianship of three young children (Gérard was not even four years old at the time) when he himself was still so young.

Cécile did not keep in touch with any of the extended family members who had not believed her story. She also gave up on religion due to the horror she had experienced. She would occasionally cross paths with people who had been in the camps with her. On one occasion, for example, as she and her sister Huguette were walking past a jewelry store, Cécile and the owner recognized each other and flew into each other’s arms. That said, they did not keep in touch afterwards.

 

Cécile with her husband and son
Photo belonging to Monique Delugin, her daughter

Cécile never spoke about what had happened to her unless someone asked her directly. Huguette was the only one of her siblings who wanted to hear her story. Cécile never seemed to get upset when she talked about what she had been through, but Huguette did. It sometimes kept her awake at night. Éliane couldn’t bear to hear about it; it made her feel sick. She learned about the Holocaust by reading about it. Cécile did not talk to her children about her traumatic ordeal at all, and this stayed with them. She sometimes even lied about it, or made something up, such as when her grandson asked her how come she had a number tattooed on her arm. This affected her daughter, Monique, in particular; she did not understand why her mother did not want to tell the truth.

Cécile on her 70th birthday. Photo belonging to her daughter, Monique Delugin

The effects of malnutrition and living in unhealthy conditions took their toll on Céline, both physically and mentally. Her health never fully recovered. She was later granted a political deportee’s pension, but once her children were grown, she resolved to become financially independent. She trained as a secretary at the Ministry of Veterans’ Affairs, and was able to retire early.

Cécile was ten years old in Algeria when they left, and Huguette just three months. When they retired, they decided to go back to visit, and met some people who still remembered their parents. Jews and Muslims got on perfectly well in the old days, according to Huguette. A year after their visit, the building where the Allouche family used to live was demolished.

Cécile died in 2004, with her husband, children and closest friends and family by her side.

Soon after Cécile died, Huguette went to Auschwitz. She now lives in the 13th district of Paris. She has kept in touch with some other children whose parents were deported, in particular the ones who were taken in and kept hidden with her. Huguette is still very close to Cécile and Michel’s children, especially her niece, Monique Delugin, who is a member of the French Deportees Federation. All three of Cécile and Michel’s children, Monique, Laurence and Yves, are now married and have children of their own.

We were honored to have the opportunity to speak with Cécile’s sister, who lived through the exodus and the Occupation, and also to hear from her daughter, who recounted some of Cécile’s rare and invaluable first-hand experiences. We found it all deeply moving. Through this biography, we hope to help preserve the memory of Cécile Allouche, married name Delugin in the annals of History with a capital H.