Before I start writing, father, I dive into your kind eyes, I want to receive your inspiration and direction in the rising sea of emotions.
But you're just a picture on the wall.
It's all your fault, Father, and thanks to you.
Before you suddenly passed away at the age of 53 from the cancer that ate you from the inside, you asked us, your children, to commemorate the Holocaust story of your parents.
Thus, with this will, we, the third generation, found ourselves interviewing the living survivors - grandparents Mordechai and Ester Keder - on camera.
My grandparents, two humble, hardworking and generous people, always lived in the present and in the future.
The past, what is there to dig in, and what do we already have to tell?
After all, we were not in Auschwitz.
Until then, they rarely shared moments away, but did not testify in an orderly manner.
The sealed box of the past was opened in front of us, their grandchildren, when they realized that it was the request of Shmuel, their dead son.
When we started the documentation then, I had no idea that this journey would turn into a detective investigation that would last for years, would include trips overseas, rummaging through archives, knocking on an ancient wooden gate and an exciting meeting at the Righteous Among the Nations ceremony.
Esther, my 93-year-old grandmother, who will have a long life in good health, was a young girl in Hungary when her parents were murdered.
The story of her survival will be told in due course.
The story of my late grandfather, who passed away three and a half years ago, is here before you.
Louise Delaunay in her youth,
May 1940
The invasion of Belgium
In May 1940 the Germans invaded Belgium.
My grandfather, Mordechai Keder, or as he was then called Marcel Keisler, lived in Antwerp, 12 years old, fatherless for eight years.
His mother, Eva Keisler nee Krengel, then 46 years old, raised him alone.
His eldest sister Esti ran away from home two years earlier and immigrated to Israel.
One evening she went to the cinema and never returned.
Later she became a warrior in Lehi.
A few weeks before the German invasion, two more children joined the family, who were entrusted to the hands of Eva, my great-grandmother.
They were Helmut and Trude Hochman, 9 and 10 years old, Jewish refugees from Germany.
"Their parents were arrested by the Belgian authorities for being German subjects, and they asked my mother to look after the children," said my grandfather.
As the Nazis approached, Eva and the three children - along with a million Belgians, Jews and non-Jews - tried for their lives.
"We had the option of escaping by plane to England, because my rich cousin bought us tickets and sent a taxi, but there was no room for the two children. My mother did not think of escaping without the children, so we fled with all the crowds by train from Antwerp to Brussels, and from there to France," said my grandfather.
"They bombed the train we were traveling in. It took a day or two until we reached the border. From there we had to walk. The Germans fired from airplanes at the escapees. It was terrible."
Among those killed in the bombings was also my grandfather's cousin, 15-year-old Mordechai Odza.
We will return to his story later.
Eva and the three children managed to arrive safely in the French city of Lille, after a frightening and exhausting journey.
"In retrospect, it became clear to us that by the time we got there, the Germans had already occupied the city," added the grandfather.
"We were sitting on the suitcase in the street. Suddenly a 16-year-old girl arrived. Mother asked her if there was a hotel in town. The girl ran home, ran back to us and said her mother was inviting us to their place."
The generous host, Louise Delaunay, was a widow with six children.
"She hosted us nicely, even though she knew we were Jewish, and housed us in the apartment of neighbors who themselves fled south."
A month later the German army ordered the refugees to return to Belgium.
Before the two widows parted, Delonia made it clear to Eva that she would not hesitate to contact her again in the future if she needed anything.
Eva and the three children returned to Antwerp.
Helmut and Truda returned to their parents, who had been released from detention in the meantime.
Life in occupied Belgium seemingly returned to normal, and Marcel returned to school.
Ava did not comply with the Nazi order according to which all Jews must register at the municipality and receive a new identity card with the word "Jew" printed on it.
Baumtz decided to stay with her old certificate.
Its situation was much better than that of most Belgian Jews, about 65 thousand people before the war.
90 percent of them were not Belgian citizens, but were defined as foreigners and refugees and were under the close supervision of the immigration police.
Marcel, her son, was not well.
He was born in Belgium and was entitled to citizenship, but his father Shmuel was a Hungarian subject.
In order to gain Belgian citizenship, the son had to give up the Hungarian citizenship he automatically received from his father.
He did so, but he did not have time to accept the Belgian woman, and with the Nazi invasion, the boy Marcel was destitute.
Lille, 1947. From right to left: Louise Delaunay, Eva Krengel and Marie Therese Delaunay.
A meeting between the rescuers and the survivor,
August 42
Deportation to labor camps
The deportation of the Jews from Belgium began in August 1942. "At first we didn't know where we were being sent. We thought to labor camps," said my grandfather.
"The deportees sent letters to their relatives with a request to send them food. There was a famine in Belgium, so at the request of the relatives and with their funding, my mother would travel to France with her old certificate, which did not say she was Jewish, to get food and send it to the deported Jews.
"One day, when my mother was driving, I heard loud knocks on the door. It was a Flemish who collaborated with the Nazis, who came to arrest me in order to send me to deportation. I was about 14 years old at the time. I heard the Flemish shout 'Where is Marcel?', and I started running around the apartment, looking for a hiding place . Suddenly I saw that in mother's bedroom there was a space between the back of the bed and the wall. I squeezed into this narrow space. The Fleming who was looking for me came into the bedroom, bent down to look under the bed. I held my breath. Luckily the open window caught his attention. He saw a figure running down the street and thought I had jumped from the window. He shot at the figure in the street and left the house."
Ava returned home and heard what happened to her son in her absence.
She realized that it was impossible to build on another miracle and that she had to take action to save his life.
I only knew Grandma Chava, Eva, when she immigrated to Israel in her old age.
She was already over 90 years old, a wrinkled woman with European manners and the smell of foreign perfume.
She did not know Hebrew, so the relationship between her and her niece was poor, and was built mainly on chocolate in the best Belgian tradition.
As a child I would look at her with curiosity and reluctance.
Once she even managed to arouse my anger when she reached out a trembling hand to our beautiful collection of napkins, chose the most worthy napkin, silver with light blue stripes - and blew her nose on it.
Who imagined then that the napkin chick hides behind her a story of female courage.
"Mother decided to move me to France, to the widow Delonia," said grandfather.
"We had an acquaintance whom my mother paid money to smuggle me to her. It wasn't that simple. We both dressed as workers and spoke Flemish to each other. There was a Gestapo man standing at the entrance to the train station in Antwerp, but even though I looked Jewish he didn't notice me."
When Marcel arrived in Lille, Louise Delaunay received him warmly and assigned him a place in an inner room that served as a warehouse.
It was a noble act that endangered her life and the lives of her children.
Eva also continued to take risks and travel on the road to visit her son, and pay a little money for the benefit of her son's economy.
"My mother used to come at least once a month to visit me. I hid there and didn't leave the house during this whole period. There was a piano there and I taught myself to play."
After about five months, the neighbors began to suspect and complain about the Jewish boy hiding there.
Louise Delaunay realized that she had to call Eva, so that she could find a safer hiding place for her son.
"There was no choice. Mother came and took me. For three days we wandered the streets of Lille, we didn't know what to do. In the end, they referred Mother to the Red Cross in the city. They sent me to an institution that operated under the auspices of the Red Cross in the village of St. Jean's Chapel, whose destination was Preventing tuberculosis for children whose parents are alcoholics I was hidden there for two years.
Later, two more Jewish children joined.
The director of the institution knew that we were Jewish, unfortunately I do not remember her name.
My mother continued to visit me every month at the institution.
She received an official document from the Mossad stating that she was allowed to visit once a month, and with this document she could travel to me," my grandfather presented the yellowed page that has remained since then with the symbol of the Red Cross on it. "When they began to deport the Jews with Belgian citizenship as well, my mother moved from Antwerp to Brussels and hid there , supposedly as a housekeeper, in an apartment very close to the Gestapo headquarters.
Towards the end of the war, she stopped visiting and did not send letters.
I didn't know what happened to her."
The exciting ceremony at the town hall of Lille.
The Delonia family also arrived in an impressive ensemble, photo: Lille municipality
September 44
Arrest and torture
With the invasion of Normandy the boy Marcel, who was already 16 years old, decided to look for his mother in Brussels on his own.
He arrived at her hiding apartment, but could not find her.
He was told that his mother had been arrested.
Only three days later, on September 7, 1944, did the mother return to Brussels.
She told her son that she was arrested as a result of the whistleblower, and the Nazis found a postcard he had sent her.
A month before they were defeated in the battles in Belgium, the Nazis were very upset that one Jewish boy managed to escape from them.
They tortured Ava to get her to reveal her son's hiding address.
"They pulled out several of her teeth, until she wisely gave them a made-up address in Paris, which by then had already been released. From the Gestapo in Brussels, my mother was sent to prison," said my grandfather.
About a year and a half before his death, I asked my grandfather why he actually did not turn to "Yad Vashem" and ask to recognize his salvations as followers of the nations of the world.
Grandfather thought about it and decided that it was better late than never.
Together with my aunt Rebecca, I helped him write the detailed testimony with the names, addresses and remaining documents.
He said that his mother kept in touch with Mrs. Delonia, and even showed us a photo preserved from 1945 of the two widows smiling together after the war.
My grandfather also kept in touch with one of the children of the Delonia family by letter, but over the years the contact was severed.
In the fall of 2016, my grandfather submitted an official request to Vashem to recognize Louise Delonia as a Chassid of Omat Olam.
As mentioned, grandfather did not remember the name of the director of the institution in the village of St. Jean's Capella, so we could not submit an official request for her as well.
The process of recognizing the followers of the nations of the world is long and tedious.
The professional committee makes sure to check the details and circumstances.
Naturally, as the years passed and the survivors and rescuers are no longer alive, the more difficult it is to verify the details.
In 2021, 296 new Righteous Among the Nations were recognized, and to date a total of 27,921 have been recognized.
Eva Krengel.
miraculously saved
Purim 2018
Death on Purim
On the holiday of Purim 2018, after reading the Book of Esther, whose heroes are Esther and Mordechai, my grandfather sat for a holiday meal in the lap of the family next to his wife Esther.
In the middle of the holiday meal, grandfather's eyes closed forever, and he is 90 years old. On the same day, my grandfather and grandmother had a grandson named Mordechai, who joined the glorious clan of Marcel Keisler's descendants - Mordechai Keder, the Jewish boy whose heroic mother and good foreign women halfway saved his life.
A few months later, in the summer of 2018, I had the opportunity to go on a work trip to Belgium.
With the death of my grandfather and my father, I felt that I was left with a third bullet to stand exposed in front of the memory of the Holocaust, with the weight of the responsibility of passing it on to the next generation.
I felt that whatever I don't know how to tell my children - may be forgotten forever.
I decided to take advantage of the trip to learn about the Holocaust of the Jews of Belgium, to look for members of the Delonia family, and to try to complete details that my grandfather did not remember.
Initially, I went to the Holocaust Museum in the city of Mechelen, which lies between Antwerp and Brussels.
From the balcony of the museum you can view the Dussain transit camp: a three-story square building with an inner courtyard.
The Jews arrested in Brussels and Antwerp were loaded onto trucks and transported to this camp.
Upon their arrival, valuables were taken from them.
Everyone received a card with a personal number and the shipment number on the train to which they were destined.
They were only allowed to go out into the inner courtyard for two hours a day, the food was very scarce, and the sanitary conditions were difficult.
When the number of Jews in the place reached about 1,000 people, the train arrived.
The nearby streets were blocked, and the Jews were loaded.
25,482 Jews and 352 Gypsies were sent to Auschwitz.
1,395 of those sent survived.
More Jews from Belgium were sent to the death camps via France.
A total of 28,902 Belgian Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.
My grandfather Mordechai in his adulthood.
died at the age of 90 peacefully in the bosom of the family,
September 4, 44
The shipment that did not go out
The main exhibition in the museum follows the various shipments, 26 in number, from Mechlan to Auschwitz.
An honorable place is dedicated to the citizens of Belgium who risked their lives to save lives.
About 25,000 Jews were found hiding places in the country, partly in various Christian institutions.
Only thanks to this, 56 percent of the Jews of Belgium, a relatively high percentage, survived the Holocaust.
I received a thick package of documents from the museum archive.
The first page contained a photo of the names of people imprisoned in the prison.
One name is circled.
KRENGEL Eva.
The napkin chick was indeed imprisoned in the camp.
My fingers caressed her name.
She arrived at the camp on August 10, 1944. Ten days earlier, on July 30, the 26th shipment left for Auschwitz.
It was intended for the 27th shipment, which did not go on its way due to the Nazi experience.
She was released on September 4, 1944.
Later, in an envelope of documents found among my grandfather's belongings, I recognized the photocopy of the ticket, with the Roman numerals XXVII (consignment 27) and the number 223, the ticket for the train from Mechelen to Auschwitz.
My great-grandmother kept it all her life, until she passed away in good health at the age of 97. My grandfather kept it after her death until he passed away.
Now I keep it - a one-way ticket to death, which apparently has a virtue for longevity.
In the other documents I found more details that grandfather did not remember.
The Jewish community in Antwerp was forced to hand over the names and addresses of all the city's Jews to the Nazi regime.
Eva and her daughter and Marcel appear in the lists.
Only now do I realize how much risk Eva took when she walked around with her real ID card, which was not stamped with the Jewish sign, while her name and address were already in the hands of the Nazis.
In other documents I found information about the Krengel family, starting in 1892 when they arrived in Belgium.
Among the documents is also the handwriting of my great-grandfather, Hirsch Zvi Krengel, a jeweler who founded the "Basics of the Torah" school in Antwerp, which still operates in the city today.
In one of his appeals to the authorities, he asked to be allowed to go to Vienna to participate in the Zionist Congress.
Accompanied by members of the staff of the museum in Mechelen, I toured Antwerp, the various addresses that appeared in the documents, my grandfather's apartment, where he also stopped breathing when he shot next to him, Eva's childhood home, the streets of the Jewish area of the "European Bnei Brak", which in recent years have been filled with followers and shops with intoxicating smells of traditional Jewish food.
Louise Delonia in her adulthood,
In front of the gate in Lille
Mosorel St. Entrance B
From there we continued to the beautiful French border city of Lille, to the address that my grandfather remembered - 19 Musorel Street, entrance B. I knew in advance that Mrs. Louise Delaunay would not open the door with a wide smile.
She was about 50 years old when she hid my grandfather.
There was not much sense in knocking on her door 75 years late.
Still, my heart drew me there, to the narrow and winding street with the ancient stone pavements, to the huge wooden gate at the entrance of the building.
I looked at the windows of the house, from which perhaps my grandfather, locked in the house for five months, looked at the bustling street, at the cathedral at the end of the street.
What was he thinking then?
I knocked on the wooden gate, pressed the intercom of all the apartments, even though foreign names were emblazoned on them.
there was no response.
The Delonia family no longer lives here.
disappointment.
I looked at the picture that my grandfather attached to his testimony at Yad Vashem.
After the war the two widows walk together hand in hand through the streets of Lille.
Will I ever meet any of this family?
We said goodbye to the picturesque night alleys and continued to the next stop where my grandfather was hidden in the village of St. Jean's Chapel.
I only had the document in French from 1943 with the logo of the Red Cross, the name of the institution and an undeciphered signature at the bottom, in attached handwriting.
Grandpa said that the staff at the Mossad "asked me to keep my Jewishness a secret, and explained that I would have to go to church. It was very difficult for me. I had to stand in line for the priest and receive the 'Holy Bread' from him into my mouth, a reminder of Jesus' crucifixion. Later, two more Jewish children came to the Mossad This one. They saw my suffering, so to make it easier for them they said they were Protestants, and thus exempted them from visiting the church."
In the village, I met the researcher Jacques Dequaquer, who pulled out treasures from two thick binders: documents and photos of the institution since its establishment in 1923, with photos of children studying and working in agriculture in the nearby fields.
He said that one of the graduates of the Mossad wrote a book and mentioned there that during the communal shower he saw that some of the boys were circumcised.
Only after the war did he realize that Jews were hiding there.
Jacques said that to this day they did not know how many Jews were involved, because none of them returned to the village.
I told him that my grandfather talked about three boys who were hiding in the institution and even kept a picture of them in his album.
Excited, Jacques pulled out a photograph of Jenny-Marie Vanland, who ran the place during the war and was active in the underground.
I examine the noble figure, with those sad eyes, who saved my grandfather.
She died in 1958, never married or had children, dedicated her life to saving and caring for other children.
Jacques intently examined the document with the Mossad insignia from 1943 and managed to decipher the signature of Principal Vanland at the bottom.
We walked together to the institution, which still operates under the Red Cross and cares for children with disabilities.
The old building was about to be demolished and rebuilt, but I was allowed inside.
My hand caressed the banister, heavy and old brown wood, of the stairs on which the boy Marcel was running.
I am in front of the door of Louise Delaunay's house in Lille.
Received my grandfather with a warm welcome, photo: Ariel Ehrlich
Scam at the entrance of the institution
Beets instead of blood
Despite the village's isolation, the Nazis did not overlook it.
They located their headquarters at the entrance to the village.
Jacques told how the three Jewish boys who were hiding in the Mossad were saved.
According to the testimony of underground man Gera Culver, a Nazi soldier came to conduct an inspection at the institution.
At the door, a guard was waiting for him who made sure to stock up on beets and chewed them right before turning to the soldier and warning him of the severe tuberculosis that the sheltered children suffer from.
When the guard started coughing and spitting blood-red fragments, the soldier got scared and gave up entering the institution.
When I returned home I published an article in "Yediot Ahronoth" about the story of my grandfather and impressions from the journey.
Among the many reactions following the publication was that of Marcel Feig, who introduced himself as the cousin of my grandfather's cousin.
A Holocaust survivor himself, who was hidden as a baby in southern Belgium and lost his father in Auschwitz.
I had never heard of this distant relative before.
At first, before I recognized his virtues as a tireless researcher who never gives up, I treated him as a distant relative, someone who was interested in the story and whose emails and phone calls should be answered politely.
But Feig quickly became a central player in the story.
Thanks to his frequent trips to Belgium and France, to his extensive connections with local researchers, to his persistent searches in the population register and voter books for the city council of Lille, he was able to locate a phone number of someone who he thought might be Louise Delaunay's granddaughter.
"Are you Louise Delaunay's granddaughter?"
- Marcel Feig asked the woman on the other end of the line.
"Yes," answered Ann Glams, "Louise was my grandmother."
"I'm looking for members of the Delonia family, for the descendants of the Jewish boy she saved in the Holocaust. Have you heard anything about it?"
"I know something very general, only that grandmother hid a Jewish child. Other than that, nothing. I would love to hear more," answered Ann with a trembling voice.
When I met her face to face, Anne told me with a smile and moist eyes that this phone call from Paige brought tears of great excitement to her.
Ann directed Paige to Andrey, the only son of the widow Delonia's six children who was still alive at the time.
Feig did not hesitate and traveled 1,000 km from Lille to the southern city of Albi to meet Andrei. "He is already over 90 years old and lives in a nursing home in Albi," Marcel reported, "but he remembers everything;
How your grandfather hid in their house, and how he was later transferred to St. John's Chapel.
He also said that during the war he visited Marcel in the village.
Your grandmother Eva used to come to Lille, visit the Delonia family, and several times she took Andrei with her as a companion to the village."
This startling information testifies to the courageous bond that remained between Eva and the Delonia family, even after they had to remove Marcel from their home.
Louise Delonia agreed to put her son at risk, to send him with a Jewish woman on a journey by train and a long walk on foot, to visit a Jewish boy.
Feig says that all these years he himself maintained a close telephone contact with my grandfather, and would come with Belgian punctuality once a year to visit him.
In the generation of the remnant of the exodus - distant family members became close.
In one of the meetings, my grandfather asked him to check what happened to the two children, Helmut and Trude Hochman, whose mother was entrusted with their care at the outbreak of the war.
Feig started a complex investigative operation and discovered that the two children had survived the war by hiding in Belgium.
He even managed to locate Truda in the United States, and thanks to his efforts my grandfather was able to have an emotional phone conversation with Truda.
Another investigation conducted by Marcel is related to a cousin who connects the two Marcels, Mordechai Odesa, who as mentioned was killed in a Nazi bombing of the refugees.
Page was able to locate his grave in a Christian cemetery in Dunkirk.
It turned out that the Jewish boy was buried as a Christian.
In a complex operation in front of all the authorities, Feig succeeded in erecting a Jewish tombstone on his grave, in which the names of his parents and brothers who did not get a grave were also mentioned, after they were sent from Mechelen and murdered in Auschwitz.
Inside my grandfather's beautifully arranged album I find photos of the Odesa family members, and the photo of the grave that Paige erected - all that remains of one family.
After Feig found the members of the Delonia family, he worked with Yad Vashem to advance the process of recognizing Louise Delonia as a Chassid of the Nations of the World.
The process was delayed for various reasons, but in the end the decision was made to officially recognize her.
Feig tirelessly continued to organize the ceremony of receiving the signal and connect all the parties: the Israeli Embassy in France, the municipality of Lille, Yad Vashem, the Delonia family and the Kader (Kiesler) family.
From right to left: Descendants of Delonia and Kader: Ariel Ehrlich, Anne Glams, Marcel Feig, Yifat Ehrlich, Shira Rabinowitz and her children: Hodia, Inbar and Mordechai, Karl Lazarev, Rivka Cohen, Dida Delonia, photo: Shmuel Rabinowitz
October 20, 2022
The family meeting at night
Six years after my grandfather submitted the request, on October 20, 2022 - it happened.
The locked wooden gate I knocked on is about to open.
In a moment I will get to meet the members of the Delonia family.
We didn't want to come empty handed.
In preparation for the event, we made a designed plaque in Israel that we printed on wooden squares, with a picture of Louise Delonia, my grandfather's picture, and the joint picture of Eva and Louise after the war.
At the bottom of the plaque is a picture of my grandparents along with about 80 of their descendants.
We added to this a candlestick with a decoration of Jerusalem - a small and symbolic jewel, about the light that connects nations.
We also prepared a large designed sign with the photo of Jenny-Marie Vanland, the director of the institution at St. Jean's Chapel, with the photo of the three Jewish children she saved, to hang in the village and thus perpetuate the name of the woman who had no descendants left in the world.
At the same time, Marcel Feig intends to submit an official request to Vashem to recognize it as a member of the nations of the world.
About 120 people gathered in the beautiful hall in the Lille Municipality building.
Among those present in the audience were also Eli Dahan, rabbi of the Jewish community of Lille, which currently numbers about 2,000 people, representatives of the Jewish students, Holocaust researchers and Holocaust survivors.
Ten family members came from Israel for the ceremony: my husband Ariel and Anochi;
my aunt Rebecca and her husband Benny;
their twin children, Yair and Shira;
Shira's husband, Shmuel, and Shira and Shmuel's three small children, Mordechai Kader's great-grandsons - Hodia, Inbar and the baby Mordechai.
The Delonia family, which over the years has spread all over France, also arrived with an impressive lineup: 12 grandchildren and dozens more great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren, together nearly 50 people.
They are excited, we are excited.
The ceremony begins.
I'm shaking, trying to hide the tears behind the camera.
present and not present
My thoughts with my missing father, and my body in the conference hall in front of the speakers in French.
The first speaker is the mayor, Martine Aubrey, a well-known politician in France, who also served as the Minister of Labor.
She wears a blue-white-red ribbon on her body, the flag of France, which gives her a representative appearance.
In front of her on the table is the flag of Israel and the flag of France.
Aubrey describes three rites of the people of the nations of the world associated with the city of Lille.
Alongside the mention of the individual rescuers, she does not spare the description of the horror and the cooperation of the citizens of France.
"Starting on June 7, 1942, the Jews were forced to wear a yellow patch at night. On September 11, 1942, a tragic and shameful night in the history of our city, on a holiday of the Jewish community, the night of Rosh Hashanah, the raids began. Several hundred Jews - women, men and children - were arrested and put on trains from Lille to Mechelen in Belgium. The final destination was Auschwitz. 513 people, including 138 children, left in this convoy. Only seven of them survived. These raids were carried out with the cooperation of the Vichy State, in the service of the executioners. French civil servants, therefore, participated in horrific acts that tarnished our collective memory, and that it is our duty to remember them and denounce them tirelessly."
Then four young men and women come up, descendants of Louise Delonia, her fifth and sixth generation.
They tell about their grandmother who was a French patriot, one of her sons joined the de Gaulle army of Free France in London as a pilot.
They tell about a woman with a broad heart and humane values, who alone supported her children, four of whom were still minors during the war.
The certificate of Louise Delonia, Righteous Among the Nations,
the speech
"Be careful in the light of kindness and goodness"
Rebecca, my aunt, a member of the second generation, speaks on behalf of the descendants of Mordechai Kedar.
"My father passed away and was not privileged to be here with us in these exciting moments," she says excitedly, "but we are here on his mission, and in the name of all 80 of his descendants. The nation of Israel is an ancient nation that is about 4,000 years old - a nation that has a long historical memory that also includes unbearably difficult periods ... like the terrible time when Nazi Germany conquered Europe, caused destruction and death and murdered with terrible cruelty, with the help of other nations, a third of our people, 6 million Jews. We will not forget and we will not forgive. In the terrible darkness, the followers of the nations of the world shone with the light of kindness and goodness, who risked their lives to save lives. We will forever remember them. Even now, after 80 years have passed, we do not forget Mrs. Delonia and her children...
"אבי, מרסל קייזלר, שלימים שינה את שמו למרדכי קדר, עלה לישראל ב־1947 ומייד התגייס לצה"ל ונלחם בחזית, כדי לעצור את צבאות ערב. ב־1950 נישא אבי לאמי, אסתר וייס, ניצולת שואה שעלתה מהונגריה ורוב משפחתה נספתה. כשהיה בן 37 החל ללמוד לתואר ראשון בכלכלה. אבי היה איש טוב לב, רגיש, חרוץ ושקדן, ותוך כדי שעבד לפרנס את משפחתו המשיך בלימודיו עד שקיבל תואר דוקטור בכלכלה. להוריי נולדו שלושה ילדים, 15 נכדים וכ־70 נינים. הודות לסבתכם זכה אבי לחיות בארץ ישראל שכל כך אהב, להגשים את חלומו ללמוד ולהשכיל ולהקים משפחה גדולה. ארבעה נינים קרויים על שמו של אבי. הראשון, אביב מרדכי, נולד ביום פטירתו של אבי, והאחרון, שקרוי על שמו, בנה של בתי, נמצא איתנו כאן היום".
כל העיניים בקהל מופנות אל מרדכי הקטן, פעוט מאיר עיניים ונמרץ במיוחד החבוק בזרועות אביו. רבקה מספרת על השי שהכנו לבני המשפחה, ומציגה את הפלקט על קובית העץ. שירה ובנותיה, הודיה וענבר, מחלקות את המתנות לבני משפחת דלוניה, שקמים וניגשים לבמה. האווירה הרשמית מתרככת מעט הודות לבלגן החביב שנוצר לרגע על הבמה, ולמפגש הבלתי אמצעי בין צאצאי המצילה לצאצאי הניצול. מצלמת הטלוויזיה הצרפתית מתעדת את הטקס ואת המפגש המרגש בין שתי המשפחות לכתבת חדשות המשודרת עוד באותו הלילה.
את האות עצמו מעניקה ורד הלר, נספחת התרבות של ישראל בצרפת, בשם שגרירות ישראל בצרפת. "כל אדם שהוענק לו אות חסיד אומות העולם מייצג את שימור ערכי האנושיות בעיצומה של התמוטטות מוסרית מוחלטת", היא אומרת. "חסידי אומות העולם הם מקור של תקווה והשראה. העם היהודי לא ישכח לא את התליינים ולא את משתפי הפעולה. נזכור לעד את האנשים החריגים הללו, אורות האומות. החסידים מזכירים לנו שהאומץ נמצא בעיקר באנשים רגילים שעשו מעשים יוצאי דופן... אות חסידי אומות העולם הוא אות הכבוד הגבוה ביותר של מדינת ישראל. זה לא פרס ולא עיטור, אלא פשוט אות של הכרת תודה והערכה נצחית. בשם מדינת ישראל, ומתוקף הסמכויות המוקנות לי, יש לי הכבוד הגדול להעניק את אות חסיד אומות העולם, לאחר מותה, לגברת לואיז דלוניה, על שהצילה את חייו של מרסל קייזלר".
One of Louise's granddaughters, Dida Delonia, came over to receive the signal.
The excited crowd rose to its feet, and Dida waved the medal.
Immediately afterwards, he invites his cousin, Karl Lazarev, to the stage, and hands her the medal and the certificate.
He explains to the audience that Claire is the daughter of Andrei Delonya, the youngest of Louise's children.
Andrey, who was very ill, could not come to the ceremony in far-off Albay.
His daughter gave him the letter and he died about a month later.
"Let's remember the past and learn from it," Heller concludes the ceremony.
"Just as then, it is also important now to rise up against fundamentalism and extremism that sow terror. The medal ceremonies of the Righteous Among the Nations have real educational value and are a beacon against racism and anti-Semitism. At a time when the last witnesses are disappearing, it is essential to pass the torch to future generations."
shishabat@israelhayom.co.il
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