Jenna Mornas | Lancaster University
This article was initially given as a talk at Lancaster University to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. It was the first time the Szafran’s history was ever shared outside the family. While their story is now shared, many others are forgotten and are waiting to be rediscovered.
The story of the Szafran family begins in Warsaw, Poland, in 1929, when Chaim Szafran (b. 1890) and his wife, Fajga Liba (b. 1892), decided to leave their home. The economic instability following the Wall Street Crash, along with antisemitic scapegoating, left them with little choice but to seek a better life elsewhere. Paris, France, became their chosen destination, and their journey began with Chaim, Fajga Liba, and their daughters Kendla (b. 1929) and Sarah (b. 1914) relocating first in 1929, followed by the entire family reunion a year later when Massia (b. 1918) and Hinda (b. 1920) joined them.
Once in France, the Szafrans faced new challenges as stateless Jewish immigrants. Like much of Europe, France was in an economic crisis and faced widespread unemployment, with over 1 million jobless French citizens by 1935. The anger of being unemployed fuelled the xenophobia of many, and the Szafran family lived in a society where anti-immigration protests were commonplace, with many French citizens blaming immigrants for the lack of jobs. Despite these tensions, the family sought to integrate into French life as well as possible. The four sisters took the first step in westernising their names: Massia became Marie, Sarah became Suzanne, Hinda became Hélène, and Kendla became Colette.
Language was another key stage to the integration process, and while Yiddish remained the primary language of communication with their parents, the sisters began speaking French to one another and became fluent. By 1935, all four sisters spoke French, though only Kendla spoke without a thick accent, having been three years old when she arrived in France. Her fluency helped her become thoroughly immersed in French society, culminating in obtaining French citizenship by 1937, aged 11. She was the first of the Szafran to gain nationality and the only one summarily stripped of it in 1940.
Her older sisters also furthered their assimilation by marrying or dating French Catholic men. Though they did not gain French Nationality immediately, they soon became French following the war. Massia married Boris Berger and started a family in Paris. At the same time, Sarah left the city with her partner in 1939, and Hinda moved to the south of France, an area unoccupied by the Germans, the so-called ‘Free Zone’, with her husband, Jean Mornas, soon after the occupation began in May 1940. The sisters who fled Paris did not return until the end of the war and never saw their parents again.
While her sisters moved out, Kendla remained at home with her parents. Chaim resumed his work as a hatmaker, and Fajga Liba managed the household. Kendla, fluent in French, became the family’s principal correspondent, handling letters and documents for her parents and taking on the role of caregiver, teaching her parents enough French to work and handle daily life while aspiring to eventually follow her sisters’ path of independence. Despite the challenging circumstances, living in a cramped ‘Chambre de bonne’, the cheapest apartment in the Jewish Quarter of Paris, located now in the Marais in the 4th arrondissement, with no shower or toilet, the Szafrans remained cheerful and optimistic, holding on to their hopes for a better future.
When war broke out in 1939, Chaim, Fajga Liba, Hinda and Kendla were still living together. This was short-lived, as Hinda left to join her husband in France's free zone not a year later. The three tried to maintain a semblance of normalcy despite the escalating tensions in France and across Europe. In May 1940, France officially surrendered to the German army, and the family, once hopeful about their assimilation into French society, was quickly thrust into the harsh realities of occupation and persecution. In July 1940, new legislation on the rights of foreign Jews, who were now nicknamed the ‘undesirables’, stripped French nationality from individuals who had immigrated after 1927, targeting around 15,000 people, including Kendla. This was the first of many measures that marked the Szafran as outsiders in a country they had worked hard to call home.
By October 1940, the so-called ‘Statut de Juifs’ (Statute of Jews) further alienated Jewish communities, codifying their exclusion from public life and paving the way for more brutal policies. The exclusion of Jewish people in public spaces like parks, restaurants and schools, and the mandatory wearing of the yellow star further highlighted their social exclusion and only embedded their alienation. Vichy France enthusiastically joined in the persecution of Jews and gladly welcomed the antisemitic ideology of the Reich. As society adapted to these changes, the groundwork for mass persecution was laid. In 1941, the Camp de Drancy was established as a transit camp, initially holding men to be transported to the east for labour.
This discrimination culminated in the Vel d’Hiv roundup of 16-17th July 1942, now remembered as the largest roundup in French History. Here, 4,500 French Policemen acted on orders of Pierre Laval, the French Prime Minister since April 1942, and arrested over 13,000 Jews, including 4,000 children. Unlike many other roundups, this one, for the first time, targeted children, older people and women. It marked a dark page in French history that many struggle to acknowledge because of the shameful acts committed by French authorities. This roundup swept up entire families, and this systemic betrayal by the state signalled the end of any hope the Szafran family might have had for safety in their adopted homeland.
Many remember, on those mornings, seeing only French police officers and being transported in regular French municipal buses. Still, most victims had no idea what awaited them as they were confined in chaotic and neglectful conditions, with barely any water and food lasting for only a week. After this ordeal, they were transported to internment camps such as Pithiviers, Beaune la Rolande or Drancy, where they awaited deportation to Auschwitz. By 1945, France had deported 75,000 Jews, and only 2,500 survived the ordeals they experienced in these concentration camps.
As they waited for their deportation, Kendla and Chaim managed to write letters moments before their final journey to Poland. Before this final letter, Kendla, who had managed to remain filled with joy even at the beginning of the occupation, was faced with Vichy’s brutal collaboration. Kendla’s letters to her sisters mainly reflected her vibrant personality and ambition. She frequently mentioned being at the top of her class and her love of reading the books her sisters sent her. These letters became a medium for expressing her dreams and hopes for the future. At just 14 years old, Kendla was full of life and eager for what lay ahead. Her letters reflected her hopes and dreams, but Kendla’s life was cut short; when this letter reached Massia’s hands, it destroyed any hope of ever seeing their family return.
These final letters are a violent blow for the surviving sisters as they reveal a harrowing awareness of their fate. Drancy’s Camp, located just outside La Cité de la Muette, served as the leading internment site where 60,000 Jews were deported to extermination camps by 1944. Though we can never fully grasp what Chaim, Fajga Liba, and Kendla felt in their last moments, their letters make clear they knew they would never return from this ‘unknown destination’.
In the summer heat, Drancy held 5,000 ‘foreign’ Jews rounded up days earlier, many already starving or sick. Conditions were dreadful, with little water, food and medical provisions. Little was done to improve their condition, as Pierre Laval dismissed the deportees as an unwanted burden on France, reinforcing the pervasive indifference to their suffering.
At 16 years old, Kendla wrote her letter with raw honesty, an unfiltered expression of heartbreak and resignation. Stripped of the assimilation she once pursued, she faced the reality of Vichy’s betrayal. ‘You must realise how we suffer’, she pleads. Her words about the boy she loved, ‘Tell Janot that I will never love anyone again, but that he does not ruin his life for me, let him forget me’, capture her innocence and despair as she wrote this final message to her sister, written with the painful certainty of no return. These final words are drastically different from her vibrant and cheerful self, which she always managed to portray through her letters. This letter reflects the maturity forced upon her when she entered Drancy. French Jewish author Joseph Joffo wrote that fleeing Nazi occupation marked ‘the end of [his] childhood’, a sentiment echoed in this letter, even though we know that she did not manage to flee the occupation. The war robbed children of their innocence, forcing them into premature adulthood, a trauma beyond comprehension. By stripping them of both life and their childhood, Vichy and the Reich not only persecuted them but also succeeded in reducing them to ‘subhuman’.
Chaim’s letter, by contrast, is a last act of desperation. His tone is measured, his pain masked in pragmatism. ‘I beg that you go see my boss, ask him if he can do anything for us…’ he writes, clinging to the faintest hope. Yet he must have known the truth—his efforts to protect his family had failed. The weight of that realisation, combined with the uncertainty of his surviving daughters’ fate, must have been unbearable. Chaim remains stoic, unable to show desperation before his wife and daughter. The deep-rooted patriarchy and duty to protect his family pushes for his desperate search for a way to escape deportation. His words reveal a different side to the male experience of war: the humiliation of failing to protect one’s family and the forced suppression of vulnerability, leaving only silent despair.
The events of Drancy and the Vel d’Hiv roundup stand as a painful testament to Vichy France’s active role in the Holocaust. Chaim and Kendla’s letters show the suffering and dehumanisation endured by those betrayed by a country that once promised hope. The humiliation and psychological torment inflicted on the victims reveal a calculated effort to erase their humanity. In revisiting this history in the 21st century, we do more than remember—we bear witness, ensuring their voices are never silenced or forgotten.
On the 23rd of July 1942, Kendla, Fajga Liba, and Chaim were deported on Convoy No. 10 to Auschwitz. They never returned. These files are the only official documents that prove that they had been rounded up in July 1942, the only trace that ties them to Vichy’s crime. While the exact date of their murders is unknown, their letters serve as testimony to their suffering. Sarah, Massia, and Hinda lived to see France acknowledge its role in their family’s destruction when, in 1995, Jacques Chirac publicly deconstructed the Gaullist myth of a resisting France. Chirac declared in his speech: ‘France, the homeland of Enlightenment and Human Rights, land of welcome and asylum, France that day accomplished the irreparable'. This marked the first of many steps that France has started to take in honour of those deported under Vichy during the occupation of 1940-1944. Today, after many years, the names of Kendla, Chaim, and Fajga Liba are inscribed on the memorial in Paris near the site of their deportation. Their letters are a vital reminder of the Shoah’s horrors. Eighty years after Auschwitz’s liberation, these words demand to be heard—to ensure that those who perished are never forgotten.
Further Reading:
Claire Zalc, Denaturalized: How Thousands Lost Their Citizenship and Lives in Vichy France, trans, by Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).
Marrus, Michael R., and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Schocken Books, 1995).
Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944, trans. By Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
Esther Benbassa, The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present, trans. By M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996).
Jenna Mornas is an undergraduate student at Lancaster University with a strong academic focus on the treatment of Jews in France and its former colonies. She is passionate about historical research and memory studies; she explores themes of antisemitism, state policies, and resistance.