Transcript

The Ordinary People Who Hid Their Jewish Neighbours From The Nazis

From Timeline - World History Documentaries · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 52 min · 5,391 words · 87 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "The Ordinary People Who Hid Their Jewish Neighbours From The Nazis", an episode of Timeline - World History Documentaries published January 11, 2026 (52 min, about 5,391 words). It mentions 12 people, works and ideas, including Gorju Golmid, Pastor Monet, Jean Bar, Pascalin Man, Robert Badontier.

What this episode is about

The narrative centers on the harrowing experiences of Jewish individuals during World War II, detailing their perilous flight from Nazi persecution in Germany and France. It highlights the courage of ordinary people who risked their lives to provide refuge for those in danger, underscoring themes of survival, sacrifice, and the profound impact of kindness amidst widespread terror.

Key takeaways

  • In the face of terror, heroism often blooms; five saviors turned fleeting fear into lasting hope for one boy.
  • Children's intuition is profound; they sense the world’s dangers long before adults articulate them.
  • France, a paradox of refuge and risk, embodied both safety from Nazis and its own history of anti-Semitism.
  • A new language isn't just communication; for Gorju, it symbolized rebirth amidst the terror of lost homeland.
  • War's aftermath fractured France, yet its citizens yearned for peace—a poignant irony while facing tyranny's onslaught.

Who speaks in this episode?

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 5:00: Gorju Golmid, Alfred Ger, Paul Gerel
  2. – 10:00: Mont Blanc, Paul Gerel
  3. – 15:00: Pascalin Man
  4. – 20:00: Robert Badontier
  5. – 30:00: Pastor Monet, Pascalin Man, July
  6. – 35:00: Jean Bar, D-Day, Margarit Subon
  7. – 40:00: Gorju Golmid
  8. – 45:00: Robert Badontier
  9. – 50:00: Jean Bar, Pastor Monet, Alfred Ger, Boris Sulnik

Notable quotes from "The Ordinary People Who Hid Their Jewish Neighbours From The Nazis"

  • The parents of Gorju Golmid decide to send their son abroad. They themselves are no longer permitted to leave Germany.
    about Gorju Golmid · at
  • We were supposed to wear the yellow star, but we never actually did. Two of our little cousins wore it and they were picked up and deported.
    about Pascalin Man · at
  • Roier Badantier and his mother had also managed to escape to Savvoir in southwest France in the foothills of the Alps just 70 km from Mijv where Gor archmet had found a safe.
    about Robert Badontier · at
  • And of course, it was Pastor Monet who took Sunday school with us.
    about Pastor Monet · at
  • Jean Bar issued over a thousand false identity documents and ration cards. A false identity could save a person's life.
    about Jean Bar · at
  • Now it was clear that for Nazi Germany, the war was lost.
    about D-Day · at
  • It was the moment Alfred Gier had also been waiting for. He had lived here for 2 years in hiding as a young teacher in a Catholic seminary.
    about Alfred Ger · at
  • Saved. No one was deported thanks to the help from Jean Baher, Pastor Monet, Margarit Subarang and many others. People who simply saw as their duty to help.
    about Margarit Subon · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Gorju Golmid — Person · Primary witness / narrated protagonist (Jewish refugee child) · 4 mentions · first at
    A central first-person storyline: sent out of Germany, sheltered in France (incl. near Mont Blanc and later Savoy), repeatedly fleeing raids and surviving via local rescuers.
  • Pastor Monet — Person · Rescuer / moral authority (vicar and teacher) · 4 mentions · first at
    A key protector figure in the refuge village (Le Chambon-sur-Lignon context): welcomes Jewish children, offers safety, and provides pastoral support for trauma and nightmares.
  • Jean Bar — Person · Rescuer / document forger (civil administration) · 3 mentions · first at
    Credited with issuing large numbers of false identity documents and ration cards—directly enabling survival for persecuted Jews (including Pascalin Man’s account and broader village rescue).
  • Pascalin Man — Person · Primary witness (Jewish child/teen in hiding; forged identity recipient) · 2 mentions · first at
    Provides testimony about the yellow star, deportations of relatives, flight to the unoccupied zone, and survival in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon area via local rescuers and forged papers.
  • Robert Badontier — Person · Primary witness (Jewish youth hiding in Savoy/Paris) · 2 mentions · first at
    Illustrates survival by blending in, the 'wall of silence' protecting fugitives, forged papers, and a near-arrest encounter with German military police; also the postwar realization of deportation outcomes.
  • Alfred Ger — Person · Primary witness / referenced educator (German-Jewish émigré) · 2 mentions · first at
    Represents early Jewish emigration to France (1933), family persecution in Germany, and later postwar educational work addressing Franco-German history and collaboration.
  • Margarit Subon — Person · Rescuer / school director (protector of hidden children) · 1 mention · first at
    As director ('Aunt Margarit'), she ran a boarding school described as a protective family-like refuge for children, including Jewish children in hiding.
  • Boris Sulnik — Person · Primary witness (Jewish child arrested; escape survivor) · 1 mention · first at
    Provides a detailed account of arrest by French police, processing at the Bordeaux synagogue, escape attempts, and postwar denial about French collaboration.
    The French police took Borisun to an assembly point, the synagogue in Boru.
  • Paul Gerel — Person · Referenced family member (Alfred Ger's father; decorated WWI veteran) · 2 mentions · first at
    Used to show the betrayal felt by assimilated/decorated German Jews under Nazism and the early decision to emigrate; anchors Alfred Ger’s family backstory.
    Paul Gerel, a German patriot and a highly decorated officer of the Imperial Army.

Places & events

  • D-Day — Event · 1 mention · first at
  • July — Place · 1 mention · first at
    Situated where the Alps merge with the region known as the province is the town of July. The name means made by God. In 1943, Pascalin mana came here.
  • Mont Blanc — Place · 1 mention · first at
    Loss and a new beginning. Initially Gorja Tur Gmid's great journey ended here at the foot of Mont Blanc in Mij and fashionable winter sports resort.

Full transcript with timestamps

Paris summer 1940. France has been defeated by the German Vermachar. Mortal terror. There is nothing worse than fearing for your very life.

The SS and the French police begin their hunt for Jews. You felt you were in danger and this fear never ever left you.

But there are places of refuge and people who know what is right and what is wrong.

Evil doesn't always have to triumph. There is also goodness in people. I will never forget how five French people risk their lives for a young boy who wet the bed every single night. I owe my life to those five people and I will never forget it.

Hamburg 1938. As in the rest of Germany, for the last 5 years, the National Socialists have been in power. Citizens of Jewish origin have been heranged, dispossessed, and forced out of their jobs. The parents of Gorju Golmid decide to send their son abroad. They themselves are no longer permitted to leave Germany. For the boy, it will be the journey of his life. I lived in Rein near Hamburg, which was 27 minutes away by suburban train. I can remember the route exactly. Station for station, scene for scene.

The train left from the last platform on the north side of Hamburg Station. It's still there today.

I can still remember my parents gradually disappearing from view. My father had taken off his hat so we could still recognize him. We had this final sight of him standing there next to his wife. I was certain that I would never see my parents again. Children know everything. That feeling will never leave me. His great journey took Gorur through Italy and into the mountains of the French Alps.

Another thing I still remember perfectly is this big tunnel you go through before reaching Vardonia and Modong. It's about 10 km long. As we emerged from it, I saw this dry grass like hair hanging down the cliff. I knew it was the first grass of freedom. And I had come from what I'd call terrorized Germany. We children felt that Germany was a country where you always turned your head to see if someone was following you. Even the landscape was scared and that was where life began for me. I knew that I was free.

I knew that France would protect me and that was an incredible feeling. France, the preferred refuge of German and Austrian Jews trying to escape from national socialist persecution. There was anti-semitism here, too. But in the eyes of the law, all citizens were equal. In 1933, Alfred Ger arrived here with his family. The national socialists had destroyed the father's livelihood. First, they took away my father's pediatric clinic. He was no longer allowed to be its director. Then, I learned from my mother that he had also been expelled from the Association of Wearers of the Iron Cross, first class.

Paul Gerel, a German patriot and a highly decorated officer of the Imperial Army. He spent four years at the front. He was a doctor for four years. And then he said, "I am no longer treated as a German. We are leaving." That was an early decision and a sound one.

It was indeed a momentous decision for the entire Gorser family, but the father could not cope with being debased and ostracized. Three weeks after we arrived in France, he died of a heart attack. He was a man of culture who had been expelled from his culture.

Loss and a new beginning. Initially Gorja Tur Gmid's great journey ended here at the foot of Mont Blanc in Mij and fashionable winter sports resort. The K Florin Montan boarding school became something of a new home for the boy from Reinbeck near Hamburg who at the time was still called Yogan Artois.

I arrived without ever having heard a single word of French. In November of that year, I was with my friends when the first snowflakes began to fall. One of them turned and said, "Oh, oh, the first snowflakes." And I suddenly realized that I had spoken French for months without being aware of it because children understand in a way that is totally different from how adults think they understand. After that I started speaking French as if I had been born to it.

French the door to a new life. Life as a Frenchman. They put me in a really low class to learn French. All the teachers were women and they were very kind to me. I learned French very quickly and things moved fast. After a year in the eighth class, I jumped a year and in the sixth class I was back in my own age group and I came first in French.

This bright pupil from Frankfurt quickly made friends and a name for himself in a small way with the scouts of Sanjan. I was in charge of a small group of six scouts. We won a competition and the group leader that was me was allowed to carry the flag. It wasn't actually a flag, just this funny thing attached to a pole. I was allowed to carry it in front of a monument to the dead of the First World War. I told the lady in charge that I was hoping to become French, but didn't yet have French nationality. So, was there any sense in me carrying the flag?

Of course there is, she said. We're celebrating peace, not victory. So, it's symbolic for you to do it.

France was sick of war. The wounds left by the First World War had not yet healed. Never again was the general attitude. But in the late30s, Hitler's wararmongering reached fever pitch. France's prime minister tried to appease him. In 1939, before war broke out, the French prime minister addressed Hitler in a wonderful radio speech. As former foes, he said, "We surely cannot go to war again."

But he could. First, he attacked Poland and then in May 1940, France. Hitler's troops swept aside all resistance. Stunned, France's military leaders had no answer to the Blitz Creek. The VH seemed invincible. After only four weeks of hostilities, German troops marched into Paris. The French government had withdrawn to Bordeaux.

We saw that the Germans were advancing very quickly. The question was, how do we escape? In the summer of 1940, tens of thousands of French citizens were on the road heading south as they fled from the invading German armies for the second time in a generation.

And my sister and I had set off south on our bicycles, carrying lots of luggage. We'd covered a few hundred kilometers. I don't have any bad memories of that because I was 15 and a good cyclist, but it was really tough for her.

It was at this time that my sister fell ill and in the south in April the following year, she died. She was 19.

She about 9 cent. After only six weeks, Hitler's triumph was complete. From now on, immigrate Germans like the Gers or George Arur Gulch again had to fear for their lives.

Before Hitler made any demands at all, and you won't read about this in any French history book, there was article 19 of the armistice agreement to be observed. France was obliged to deport any fugitive that Germany wanted to have sent back. As a result, many anti-Hitler Germans were in turned in camps as hostiles. This was the case in Guus, for example, and in many camps. All the Germans had to do was pick them up, so to speak, because they had already been detained.

France was partitioned. The northwestern part came under German occupation. In 1942, an area in the east was occupied by the Italians. Ivier and Goratu Golmet were in the zone libra, the supposedly free zone, which was not yet occupied by German troops. It was there in the summer of 1940 that a French satellite state was declared with an extreme right-wing dictatorial government. The capital of this state authority was the spar town of Vichi. Marshall Patan became the head of government. Jews now began to be discriminated against there too, just as Hitler wanted.

The formation of the Vishi government in 1940 saw the introduction of anti-semitism at state level. From one day to the next, Jews were no longer permitted to work in the civil service nor head their own company. Many measures of this kind were decreed by Vichi by the government itself and not under pressure from the occupying Germans. There was a kind of competition between the state anti-semitism of the Vichi government on the one hand and German anti-semitism on the other.

In the German occupied part of France, it was now not only immigrants who were in danger, but also French Jews. Systematically, the SS began to register all Jewish inhabitants. Some fled in haste, leaving everything behind and hoping to at least save their lives.

You felt you were in danger. And this fear never ever left you. Jews were discriminated against, haranged and subjected to checks by the French police, too. From 1942, Jews in the German occupied zone had to wear a yellow star. people like Pascalin Man who back then was called Pascaline Cayenne.

We were supposed to wear the yellow star, but we never actually did. Two of our little cousins wore it and they were picked up and deported. We never saw them again. It drove their mother crazy. Summer 1942. German and French behind the scenes masterminds had planned a major coup. All Jews in Paris who were not French citizens were to be arrested and deported. The Grand Raflu, the big raid took place on July the 16th. This is the only photograph documenting the operation. It shows French police vehicles.

Jews were brutally arrested in full public view. Public opinion termed. In other words, there was anti-semitism in 1940 and 41. People were often indifferent to persecution of the Jews. But in the summer of 1942, when women and children were arrested, they were shocked.

Thousands were crowded together in the Veliv, the Veladrome in Paris, but some managed to avoid this fate. There were small gestures. People tried to protect the young ones. If they couldn't save the parents from being taken, then at least they could save the children. Don't go home, they'd say. They're waiting for you. It was little hints like that which prevented someone from being arrested.

In June 1942, during this major operation alone, 13,000 Jews were arrested and deported to the extermination camps in the east. Very few returned.

By this time, Pascalene Magna and her family were no longer in the city. They had fled across the demarcation line into southern France, which had not yet been occupied. Roier Badantier and his mother had also managed to escape to Savvoir in southwest France in the foothills of the Alps just 70 km from Mijv where Gor archmet had found a safe haven. The badoners led a very discreet life. For a while, we lodged with an old lady who lived alone and went to mass every morning and most definitely on Sundays. Of course, she never asked any questions.

The policy, the general attitude was never to talk about things. There was a kind of wall of silence. A wall of silence. Fugitives could hide behind. Shumberei once the seat of the Dukes of Seavoi. Robera attended grammar school here quite normally just like all the other pupils.

We lived like everyone else, not hidden away. That would have been a big mistake. And strangely enough, I think it was this totally natural attitude which protected us. In the final analysis, this seemingly so dangerous policy of leading a normal life as if there was nothing to be concerned about proved to be our protection.

You have to realize that the French, apart from a very small minority, didn't like the Bush, as they disparagingly called the Germans. That was because of their memories of the First World War. French families were characterized by very strong anti-German patriotism. The French helped Jews because they wanted to do something against the Germans. It might only have been a minor gesture, but at least it was something.

Badontier route to school took him over this bridge which connects Shambbury with Cona. A short time later, the badon moved into a house in a middleclass district of Ca. The mayor who had been appointed by Vichi lived almost opposite. In those days, man wore hats and he used to greet my mother most politely and she returned the greeting. But he never entered into conversation with her. On no account did he wish to establish a relationship with her which would require him to ask certain questions. Science is best. That was the general rule.

But once again, it seemed the fugitives had merely been granted a reprieve. In November 1942, the Germans also occupied Vichi France. And in 1943, after Italy changed sides, they also moved into those areas previously occupied by the Italians. The SS and their French helpers began to search in earnest for Jews, including in MV, where Gorja Tumet lived. They often sent me down into the valley to fetch bread and things. Jews were also hiding in the village. One day I saw ve trucks parked outside a grossers. Their tailgates were down and this very polite man in a green leather coat as in case you don't know, was helping these poor people onto the trucks.

They were then sent to and I knew they'd disappear forever. I can still see this one small boy with black eyes. I see him quite clearly.

I would love to have said, "Take me. I'm one of them as well." But I didn't, of course. Inside me there was some kind of strange suicidal thought. You're leaving them to their fate, aren't you? Bordeaux on the Atlantic coast has always been a city with a large Jewish community. The aim was to destroy it and all other Jews who had found refuge in Bordeaux. Like Boris Solnik in hiding with a Christian family, he had been betrayed. Strangely enough, when they arrested me, I knew that they wanted to kill me because my family had already been arrested and had disappeared. So, I knew they wanted to kill me.

The French police took Borisun to an assembly point, the synagogue in Boru. There was this woman who gathered the children together. and offered them sweet condensed milk. I was scared to go there. There were blankets and cartons of sweet condensed milk, but they were designed to draw the children together. They would all then be locked in a truck and killed.

I didn't want to go with that woman and her blanket, so I stepped to one side. That probably saved my life. I made several naive attempts to escape, but they failed. German soldiers kicked me and hit me with their rifle butts. When the order came to leave, I ran towards the toilet because I thought that being as small as I was, I would perhaps fit through a window.

The Germans never thought of looking up. When things felt quiet, I dropped down again. I went past the French Gestapo. The synagogue was empty. German soldiers were outside and only the French Gestapo was still inside. They saw me leave, but no one tried to stop me. I just can't understand why.

Since 1941, the occupying German forces had been assisted by French police units known as the Kang. There were thousands of them. Together with the Germans, they spread terror amongst the persecuted.

These people, a German and two Frenchmen, came to San Rafael where we lived, in order to arrest us. Someone must have betrayed us, but we had no idea who, nor did we know how the inform knew who we were. But we got away just in time. My mother went to K, and then I went to Marseilles. Gorge was also on the run again. One day he fled hell to Skelter from the boarding school in Majv because of an impending raid.

I was walking up this steep and narrow mountain path when I saw an officer and two soldiers with machine guns coming towards me. Never until my dying day will I forget that little black hole pointing straight at me.

I was in mortal terror. There's just nothing worse than fearing for your very life. Your legs suddenly aren't long enough to make a run for it, and you search for some way of escape. Amazingly, this left tenant or whatever he was stepped to one side to let me through. I was absolutely terrified and sank to my knees.

Then I saw this Vmach scout car with two soldiers sitting in it. One of them said, "Such a goodlook blonde lad. He's not from here." I was trembling with fear and headed off into the mountains. Fear affects your self asssurance and that is the worst thing of all.

Extending from Lake Geneva down to the Mediterranean are the foothills of the Alps. A landscape that is ideal terrain for partisans and fugitives. Situated where the Alps merge with the region known as the province is the town of July. The name means made by God. In 1943, Pascalin mana came here.

My mother was friends with a woman who was living in hiding in Ji. She told my mother that people would take care of us there. That is how we all came to go to July.

Roughly half the 3,000 inhabitants of July are Catholic, the other half Protestant. The village has a centuries old tradition of protecting the persecuted. Many Hugenos found refuge here. Now it was Jewish children who were being saved. I was welcomed by the vicar pastor Monet.

He reminded me of my grandfather. And he said something to me I will never forget. You will stay with us here. You will be safe. Imagine the impact those words had after all the fear we had experienced.

Pastor Monet was goodness itself, waiting patiently outside his door. We queued up to tell him about the nightmares which regularly tormented us. It was reassuring for us to tell him about our bad dreams. At the time, Francois Mayor was also a pupil at Vvayon boarding school where Pastor Monet taught. All the children whether they were Jewish, Protestant or whatever, had to attend Sunday school. It was compulsory. And of course, it was Pastor Monet who took Sunday school with us. Today, Bvayon boarding school is a home for children from difficult home backgrounds. In those days, it was a progressive school similar to the rural school movement in Germany.

The director was a woman, Margarit Subon. Margarite Margarit Subon was known as Aunt Margarit and her school really was a family, a new family for me. Warm, welcoming, and kind. It was something quite extraordinary. Extraordinary.

But the idol was deceptive. Everything could be over from one day to the next. The Germans weren't far away. only 20 km from Dulfi. So they posed a threat.

My brother and other Jewish children and adolescents attended school during the day and spent the night in a nearby grotto in the forest. If they saw a red blanket on the school balcony, it was a signal to stay where they were and not come in.

Occasionally, we received information. Sometimes even the police warned us if the Germans were about to carry out office checks because too many ration cards were disappearing or because false identity papers had turned up the town hall in July. The mayor had been appointed by the Vichi government, but Pascalin Mana had no other choice. I urgently needed a forged identity card. So, one morning, shaking with fear, I went with my mother to the town hall. We were received by the mayor's secretary. She was a charming young girl. So, you need an identity card? She asked.

Yes, I replied. She then asked what name should appear on it. Colom, I said, and told her how old I was. She then looked straight at me and said, "Let's put down that you've got green eyes." She then took a stamp and I left with my identity card. And now to the story of Jean Ban.

She was 22 years old and not at all happy at what was being done to Jews. Jean Bar issued over a thousand false identity documents and ration cards. A false identity could save a person's life.

You could get false papers in various towns in southern France. I kept my name because it doesn't sound very Jewish.

Things got more difficult when they started using ink stamps. They were harder to get hold of, but it was still possible. Between 1942 and 1944, everyone tried to obtain a false identity card. Forgery had become almost a national sport in our country. the false ID of Robert Bontierus. Now we all came from San Aair. So we had all become Breton. That was because the registry of his archives in San Aair had burnt down. So if anyone had wanted to verify our identity, there would have been nothing to verify it with. Thus we had genuine false papers or if you like false genuine papers.

June the 6th, 1944. D-Day, the Allied landings in Normandy. Now it was clear that for Nazi Germany, the war was lost. But for the persecuted, at first the situation became even worse. Every evening, my brother and I hung a cloth bag containing a little money, some shoes, and false papers in the window just in case we had to flee. We had an escape route planned, even for nighttime. France was in revolt, supplied with weapons by the Allies. Now in summer 1944, the resistance rose up.

The German reaction was to spread terror. Oradur Surlan. In one of the most heinous war crimes ever committed in France, virtually the entire population was murdered by the SS and the village raised to the ground. Under the command of SS officer Alois Bono, special units combed the land, sending thousands to their death. It was a veritable obsession to pursue Jews right to the bitter end in keeping with Hitler's wish to see Jews physically exterminated. The concept now was Germany might be losing the war, but before it is lost, the Jews will still have disappeared from the face of the earth.

The aim was as simple as that. To kill every single Jew in Europe. But where danger grows, sometimes salvation grows too. In the mountains of Mijv, Gorju Golmid found refuge on the Allah family farm. What fantastic people the allows were.

For them, it was the most natural thing in the world to protect anyone who was in danger. They displayed typical Savoyan rebelliousness. Suddenly there he was and we knew at once that he was on the run. He stayed with us all the time. He never went into the village and we weren't allowed to talk about it at school or anywhere else. we were most discreet.

I remember it all very clearly. But even up here in the remoteness of the French Alps, danger threatened.

Every Tuesday, German soldiers used to turn up on skis, snow l. They just wanted to buy butter or eggs, of course. But every day the poor farmer thought they would come and arrest him and have him shot. Just imagine how scared the family and I were. I lay hidden in the hay. I thought they'd come and take me with them.

I wouldn't wish the fear I felt on my worst enemy. What I remember most of all is how he used to suck his thumb. That surprised me because he wasn't a child anymore but a strapping lad of 16. My father said we should ignore his thumb sucking. I think he did it because he was nervous. And hidden deep down inside him was a boy's yearning to go home.

I worked out this fantastic attitude. Otherwise, I wouldn't have made it. If I had felt really homesick, I would either become ill or who knows and so much confusion, you can so easily end it all, like throwing yourself off a cliff or something.

But I found this method of never feeling homesick. I developed it so well that images of my home village could come into my mind without making me cry. In those summer days of 1944, Robert Badontier had a knife edge encounter he will never forget.

I was coming back from school on my bike when I saw German soldiers, military police holding up a stop sign. They wanted to see my papers. So, I pulled out my school identity card. The soldier looked at it, looked at me, and looked back at the card. I didn't like that at all. I looked left and right to see if there was any way I could escape. There wasn't. He called over his colleague and showed him my ID card. I'd like that even less and thought, "This is going to turn out badly for me. He came back to me and said, "Just a moment." He took out his wallet.

I wondered what he was doing. He then pulled out a picture of his son, a member of the Hitler Youth. And said, "I bore an astonishing resemblance to him." And I saw this picture of a young lad. He must have been about 16 like me. He was wearing this armband. It almost seemed to me like I was in the Hitler youth.

I smiled. What else could I do? He then put his photo back. He looked at me again and I left. You sense it when someone is looking at you. I got on my bike and cycled about 30 m. I felt that he was still looking at me and I knew he was thinking about his son.

It was one of the most astonishing moments I have ever experienced. He saw his young son in me and in him I saw death. It truly was an astonishing moment. On August the 15th, 1944, American troops and free French forces also landed near San Rafael on the Kotazur.

2 weeks later on August the 29th, Marseilles was liberated, the biggest city in the region. The nightmare was over. It was the moment Alfred Gier had also been waiting for. He had lived here for 2 years in hiding as a young teacher in a Catholic seminary. Ever since childhood, I have been an atheist and at the same time closely linked to the Catholic Church. I was told that it was either baptism and help or no baptism and no help. So I had myself baptized. But I regard that baptism as insignificant. It has no value. And so I don't even acknowledge it. But I was helped by being sent to Marseilles where I stayed until the end of the war.

Victory here in Marles. The war was over in August 1944. No more persecution, no fear, no hiding. The blood hounds had been defeated. And for Ivy Corer, a new era began.

A friend of mine was seriously injured in Marseilles. He was taken to hospital but died. Lying in the next bed to him was a young German prisoner. Like me, he was 19. I spoke German to him for a long time. He really had no idea of all the horror. And then I felt partly responsible for his future. No collective guilt but shared responsibility. That became my life after the war. In those August days of 1944, after 4 years of German occupation, the war was also over in Paris. The Badoni returned to the French capital, but there was still no trace of Rubber's father, who had been deported. Only slowly did the full magnitude of the crime against the Jews become apparent.

Neither I nor my mother had any idea of what had happened. It was only towards the end of the war in April and May 1945 that we saw American newsre footage.

Footage like this. At the end of April 1945, American troops liberated Daho and documented the inconceivable. We saw the concentration camps. We saw that Dhau had just been liberated. And I said to my brother, "Papa will never come back." He was in no physical condition to have survived anything like that. I told my brother that our mother should not be allowed to see such pictures, but she had apparently seen them already and didn't want us to see them. That was when we understood that father would never return. It was all over.

At the end of the war, there were 1500 refugees living in July, one in three of the population. My family was very lucky. We were all saved. No one was deported thanks to Thanks to the help from Jean Baher, Pastor Monet, Margarit Subarang and many others. People who simply saw as their duty to help.

We never spoke afterwards about what had happened in July during the war. We became friends and we never had to thank them for their help. They said it was normal, simply normal. That still means so much to me.

The miracle of Jui was that not one of the persecuted who were hidden was betrayed, denounced or handed over.

In a village, the whole population has to keep silent. If one person opens their mouth, it's over. A family is arrested. That was also reality in France in those days. [clears throat] There is one statement I heard time and again in interviews with Jewish witnesses. They knew we were Jewish, but they never said a word. Gives you food for thought. I'm meditating.

Little Boris Sulnik survived the war with farmers near Bordau. But for a long time, nobody really wanted to hear his story.

After the war, whenever I said that I had been arrested by French police, the French didn't want to listen. Cultural denial prompted them to say, "No, no, it was only the Germans." But there were German soldiers and French policemen. It's hard for the French to realize that they collaborated with the Nazis. Many of them find that difficult to accept.

Clearing away the taboos and traumas of German French history became Alfred Ger's mission in life. The work we have done since the war is educational work. It's not work promoting friendship or reconciliation. It's solely educational work about France and Germany. Educational work.

Despite a government and a police force that played an active part in persecuting Jews in France, seven out of eight Jewish children survived thanks to people like those in July MV and I have enormous respect for them. Every time I travel through Seavoi, I always call in and I always feel relaxed and at peace. That's because I am reminded that evil doesn't always have to triumph. There is also goodness in people.

I believe that everything I have written has been the attempt to get it all out again. But I can't get it out. Our memory is also there to protect what we have forgotten. And what I have written has always been an endeavor to say the right thing after all. But I'm not capable of it.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "The Ordinary People Who Hid Their Jewish Neighbours From The Nazis"?

Gorju Golmid (Guest), Alfred Ger (Guest), Pascaline Magna (Guest), Robert Badontier (Guest), Jean Baher (Guest), Pastor Monet (Guest), Margarit Subon (Guest).

What is "The Ordinary People Who Hid Their Jewish Neighbours From The Nazis" about?

The narrative centers on the harrowing experiences of Jewish individuals during World War II, detailing their perilous flight from Nazi persecution in Germany and France. It highlights the courage of ordinary people who risked their lives to provide refuge for those in danger, underscoring themes of survival, sacrifice, and the profound impact of kindness amidst widespread terror.

What is mentioned in this Timeline - World History Documentaries episode?

12 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Gorju Golmid, Pastor Monet, Jean Bar, Pascalin Man, Robert Badontier, D-Day. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "The Ordinary People Who Hid Their Jewish Neighbours From The Nazis"?

The episode runs 52 min; the transcript is about 5,391 words in 87 timestamped sections.

More from Timeline - World History Documentaries

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 24, 2026.