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B.'s wife and daughter
Khaykele also played on the Yiddish stage.
About his life in the Hitler
Period and tragic killing, his daughter writes (in our
translation):
"My husband and I were
forced to leave Paris from being in the city in the time
when the German soldiers had marched into the city from
the other side. We took our parents with us, but in
Bordeaux they had warned us that the invading army will
arrest all the men of military age. We had, with pain in
our hearts, had two choices: to remain there and be in
danger of being arrested, or travel to England, because
my husband was born in England, and moreover we had two
small children. Naturally we then had no clue what
devilish deeds Hitler would do to the Jews.
Everything I knew about my
parents in the coming two years, were the twenty-five
words of news that we received through the Red Cross for
two to three months in London. Then we also did not
require it. At first after the war, we had, through a
friend who had remained in Paris, received bits of
information where they lived. Once my mother, together
with a neighbor and her two children, were arrested in a
street, through a delivery by a Frenchman, who had a
factory of leather articles. He used to get paid for
every Jew that he had spoken to [gemsrt].
My father remained alone in
Paris for about a year's time and was virtually at home
all the time. He sat an entire day and wrote a diary,
early on in Yiddish, and then in Yiddish with Latin
characters. A neighbor kept this diary for me and gave
it to me after the war. It contained more than ninety
thickly written pages, and for me a cherished document.
I will leave it to one of the institutions that is
founded in Paris, or in Israel, where my father has a
sister. He always had a talent for description, and his
writing about daily life during the German Occupation of
Paris, and the horrible life of the unfortunate Jews in
those bitter times, tears the heart. After my return in
1945, I read it over the course of a whole night and
used it bitterly, it broke my heart so, that I was no
longer able to read it again. However, when I touch the
papers, I feel the sorrow, the suffering he has gone
through. His last writing was a day after Rosh Hashanah,
or after Yom Kippur, and he remained standing in the
midst of a word ...
After my return, I began to
make inquiries. Their housekeeper said to us that on a
certain day a French policeman came to question her
about my father. He had just arrived when they spoke,
and she thought that when he heard the policeman's
voice, he would hide or walk out the back door. But,
like my mother, he was a lost man, lacking courage and
strength, and immediately entered the policeman's hands.
Shortly after my return, I
happened upon a man in the 'metro' who I knew before the
war, and he said to me that he happened upon my father
in Drancy, the Paris camp, where the Jews were kept
before they deported them. 'He was very brave, your
father -- he said to me -- the last time that I had seen
him, he said: "The allies are breaking Hitler's bones.
You will see, we will knock him down.' I kept one query.
I waited for the embassy, which brought back some
deportees who were created after the war and, after
searching for thousands of documents, finally found my
mothers' and fathers' names. From these, I knew the date
of their deportation -- my mother in August 1942, and my
father in December 1943. I used these dates for the
'yahrzeit' for them. A monument was placed in a French
cemetery called 'Père Lachaise,' which I visit twice a
year. I left a tombstone in the form of a 'small Torah,'
with their names and an inscription that buried the
ashes of them and hundreds of thousands of victims of
Nazi barbarism. I also realized that my parents had been
transferred from Drancy to Auschwitz (Oswiecim), where
they had been killed."
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