Jacqueline Nadia DENEMARK
(1923, Paris – 1944 or 1945?)

When Jacqueline was born on March 20, 1923, her parents, Cécile and Erakhmiel (also known as Raymond) Denemark, placed a birth announcement in the French newspaper, Le Journal. Her grandfather, Bernard Rosenfeld was a witness when her birth was declared, as was a cousin of the family, Max Wessager. Jacqueline was the couple’s second child: her older brother, Joseph Irving, was born in 1918 while Raymond was mobilized during the First World War.

The world was brighter place by the time Jacqueline arrived! The family was living in an upmarket apartment at 35 rue de Maubeuge in the 9th district of Paris, where her father also had his own dental practice. Her grandfather, who was a jeweler, was also quite well off, and one of her mother’s uncles, a diamond merchant, was a great philanthropist, committed to the cause of Eastern European Jews who were seeking asylum.

For the time being, we have no information about Jacqueline’s schooling, hobbies or social life. Did she play chess with her father, who was a keen player? Did she help her mother raise funds for “Asile israélite” (Jewish asylum), a charity that her Uncle Landsmann had founded?

The family was Jewish, originally from Russia and Poland, and very well integrated into French society. They lived in a middle-class neighborhood, far from the Marais and République districts, where most of the Jews lived, often working in miserable conditions in the “rag trade” (garment manufacturing), the fur trade or in millinery.

Jacqueline’s maternal grandparents, the Rosenfelds, who also lived in Paris, were naturalized French citizens, as was her father. Her mother was born French. It therefore goes without saying that she herself was also a French citizen. This nationality issue would hardly have troubled her in 1939, when she was in high school and passed her mock exams, which qualified her to take the baccalaureate exams. However, the declaration of war against Germany and the subsequent defeat of France would soon interfere with that plan.

What did she do in 1940? Did she move south during the exodus, as millions of people from Paris and the north of France did? We do not know, but the following year, she took her baccalaureate exam in philosophy [which in France is traditionally the first of the baccalaureate exams], and she passed it. But she already knew that she was not just an ordinary French girl, like her classmates. By that time, Germans and Marshall Pétain’s collaborationist government had branded her an outcast.

A careful analysis of the list of students who took their exams in July that year suggests that few young Jews even attempted them (and the majority of those who did pass were girls). In October 1941, the French government passed a decree that required all Jewish people to take part in a census. This took effect in the Seine department on October 31. They were listed in what is widely referred to as the “Jewish file”, or the “Tulard file”, named after the man who founded it.

Given that the father was a dental surgeon and the family quite well known in Jewish philanthropic circles, it would have been unthinkable for them not to go to register themselves as Jews at their local police station. Did Jaqueline wear the obligatory yellow star emblazoned with the word “Jew”? Going to high school in such circumstances would not have been easy. Might she have taken her baccalaureate exams elsewhere, as an independent candidate?

On January 1,1942, Jacqueline’s 80-year-old grandfather Bernard died, and was buried a few days later in the Jewish section of the Bagneux cemetery south of Paris. Did she go to his funeral on January 4, to see him laid to rest?

Jacqueline was 21 years old and had barely come of age when her life was turned upside down.

On July 27, so her grandmother recounted after the war, the French police arrested Jacqueline, her father, her mother and her brother. They were probably held at the police station overnight. At noon the following day, they were taken to the Paris Police Headquarters depot, and then at 3 p.m. a French policeman escorted them to the Drancy internment camp on the northern outskirts of Paris.

Jacqueline, although she was a French citizen, was deemed to be “deportable” immediately, as were the rest of her family members. She and her mother were sent an area off a specially designated staircase with the other prisoners who were soon to be deported. She may not even have had the chance to meet anyone in the camp other than the people who were to share her fate on July 31. People who were about to be deported were kept physically separate from the other prisoners in the camp.

On the morning of July 31, 1944, at dawn, all carrying their little bundles, they went down to a courtyard, which was surrounded by barbed wire, ready to leave for an “unknown destination” further east. They were then loaded onto buses that shuttled back and forth between Drancy and the Bobigny train station. Jacqueline may have been able to stay with her family, both on the bus during the journey. As soon as she hoisted herself up into the cattle car, she would have seen the bare wooden floor, no windows apart from a little opening at the top, a bucket of drinking water (which one of the deportees would fill up on the rare occasions that the train stopped) and another bucket that the 60 or so people in the car would all have to share, and which would not stay empty for long.

The train did not leave until around midday, and after a long, harrowing journey that proved fatal for many sick and elderly people, it arrived in Auschwitz during the night of August 3-4. The cars were cleared very quickly and down on the ramp, the men were sent to one side and the women and children to the other. Then came the selection, to determine who would go into the camp to work, and who was destined to die immediately. According to the testimony of Convoy 77 survivor Denise Holstein, Jacqueline was selected to work in the Birkenau camp. In October or November, she was transferred to other camps and eventually died in Bergen-Belsen.

Given her age and social standing (her father had deposited a large sum of money during the search at Drancy), Jacqueline must have looked healthy and fit enough to work. However, while that meant that she passed the selection and was sent into the women’s camp, she was not strong enough to survive the inhumane treatment, starvation and disease in the camps.

After the war, her grandmother Anna Rosenfeld began the necessary formalities to have her death confirmed, but she died in 1951, before she was able to complete the file. In 2012, in accordance with new French guidelines, a search was carried out for Jacqueline’s birth certificate, in order that the words “Died in deportation” could be added to the registers. The search was initially unsuccessful, but in the end, the birth certificate was found.