YVETTE CHAPIRO *
Yvette Chapiro
“My story is not typical.”
-Ms. Schulman, October 2019
Yvette Chapiro grew up under the German Occupation of Paris. Her story is one of tragedy, uncertainty, and instability. However, more than anything, Yvette defines her life as one of luck and one of hope.
Before the War
Yvette Chapiro Schulman was born in 1932 in Mulhouse, France to Rose Gingold and Ephim Chapiro. Her mother, Rose Gingold was born in Warsaw in 1897. In 1900, the Gingold family immigrated to Germany. Rose was raised in Berlin with her twin sister and five siblings in a German speaking household. At eighteen, Rose enrolled in the Universität der Künste Berlin (Berlin University of the Arts), where she concentrated in painting and sculpture. In 1920, Rose met Ephim. Ephim was born in Minsk in 1897, but moved to Kiev at the age of three. Ephim was raised in a French and Russian speaking household. Ephim moved to Moscow and joined the Tsar's Army as a means to gain an engineering education. In 1916, sensing the beginnings of what would become the Russian Revolution of 1917, Ephim asked permission for leave and fled to Berlin. He finished his engineering education in Berlin alongside Jacob and Hermann Gingold, Rose's brother's. In March 1921, Ephim and Rose married in Berlin in a double ceremony with Rose's twin sister Théophile and husband Arthur Aronheim. Soon after the wedding, Rose and Ephim settled in Mulhouse where, a decade later, they had Yvette.
In 1935, Ephim made contact with a socialist mayor from a small town on the French-Belgian border, Louis Fiers. Louis Fiers wanted to create jobs with an emphasis on securing workers' rights. Ephim convinced his in-laws, recent refugees from Germany, to invest in Geka-Lafab, a businness that manufactured radio parts. As the only French citizen in the family, Ephim nominally owned 50% of the factory although in theory shares were split between him and three of his wife's siblings, all three holding PhDs in electrical engineering. And so, the family moved from picturesque Alsace to the bustling city of Paris.
The family settled in the 13th District of Paris, where Yvette lived a comfortable life. As the only child, she was “spoiled”, spending her summers at the movie theatre, swimming in rivers, playing at the park near her house, and bonding with her cousin Eva, whom was more like a sister. Although many of the neighbors in her childhood apartment, located at 129 Massena, identified as Jewish, her neighborhood was predominantly Catholic. She does not recall a time when she ever experienced direct anti-Semitism in her community before the war. Contributing it to non-descript features, she claims that no one really noticed her or even perceived her to be Jewish. After all, she and her mother minimally practiced Judaism, although they remained fully engrained in the culture of Jewish identity. Her father, however, attended an Orthodox synagogue for high holidays.
During the War
In 1939, France declared war on Germany. The so-called Drôle de Guerre (Phoney War) ensued. Ephim, as a French citizen, was drafted into the French army, but allowed to remain in Paris to run the family factory for the French cause. Yvette's uncles were not as lucky. Jacob, Hermann, and Arthur were stripped of their German citizenship as Jews under the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 and consequentially were placed in internment camps for enemy aliens. When the Nazis invaded France in the summer of 1940, the uncles were released. As documented history tells us, the French formally ceded its power and territory to the Nazis. This reality meant that a life of safety and French unity would come to an end for Jewish people. Hermann was soon arrested again: this time not as an enemy alien, but as a Jew.
Perhaps people should have fled earlier; their lives could have been saved. But as Yvette’s father illustrates, it was difficult to leave behind an established life on soil that welcomed them only a few years before. Her father owned a radio factory in Paris, and because of this, he felt compelled to stay and run it. Ephim also believed, at least for a while, that he and his immediate family would be spared as French citizens.
Beyond being a child at the start of the Occupation, it was that lack of direct experience with anti-Semitism that contributed to Yvette’s continued optimism as restrictions on life began to tighten. In 1941, the Nazis requisitionned Yvette's public school at Porte d'Ivry for army barracks. Yvette was forced to walk an extra two miles each day to her new school where she was one of the only Jews in her class. When Jewish people were mandated to wear the yellow star, she thought of it as a matter-of-fact declaration instead of a mark of shame. Despite the star, she made “gentile friends” who continued to honor her humanity. Her optimism in the beginning was not unique, but throughout the entirety of her Holocaust experience, she remained reluctant to condemn Parisians. In fact, she contributes her safety to the unwavering kindness of the people around her. Importantly, for Yvette, in order to "go on", she feels she has to remember and think only of those who helped save her as a human being and not those who condemned and denounced her as a Jew.
In spring 1942, the factory workers at Geka-Lafab urged Ephim to go into hiding having overheard rumours concerning a denunciation and imminent plans to aryanise the factory. In June 1942, Monsieurs Fernand Fulpin, Maurice Boucher, Paul Annould received official recognition from the German authorities granting them ownership of the "Jewish" establishment. Ephim fled to Lyon, leaving his wife and daughter in Paris. He believed they would be safe, as up until this point women and children had not been arrested.
Around this time, at ten years old, Yvette experienced a life changing moment. Invited to the communion by her best friend from her building, Gisèle Marigot, Yvette decided to go--and tear off her yellow star forever. Soon after, she went to live with her grandparents in Plessis-Robinson. There, Yvette attended a public school where no one knew she was Jewish. Rose remained in Paris throughout this period. In July of 1942, Yvette decided to return to Paris and stay with her mother. Right before she left Plessis-Robinson, she remembers an embrace from her teacher. Yvette suspects the teacher knew she was Jewish all along--and expected the young girl to never return because whispers had begun about the next phase of anti-Semitic legislation.
In Paris, Yvette and Rose received a visit at their apartement from an off-duty Paris policeman. The policeman was sent to them by a family friend from the building who owned a stationary store. The policeman asked where Ephim was. Yvette responded that he had already fled to the unoccupied zone. The policeman responded that Yvette and Rose should follow Ephim. He hinted that women and children would be arrested in the next major round-up. After the policeman left, the stationary owner came to the apartment and begged Rose to accept her ID card and leave Paris for Lyon. Although the two women looked nothing alike--particularly due to their difference in eye color--the whisperings were too loud for them to continue to brush off the concerns.
Rose and Yvette left the following day. They travelled to a town on the border of the occupied and unoccupied zones. From there, Rose went to the concierge at a local hotel and asked for someone to help her and her daughter cross the river. Arrangements were made for the two to cross at night. Yvette recalls removing their shoes as her mother and her walked underneath the open window of the Gestapo headquarters. When they arrived at the water's edge, a French policeman stopped the mother and daughter. He demanded to see Rose’s ID and permit to enter the Free Zone. She only had the former--and to complicate matters, the ID was not even her own. Rose froze. The policeman then turned to Yvette and asked her what her mother and her were doing trying to cross to the unoccupied zone without a permit. Yvette did not know what to say. The policeman turned away. In the intervening moments, a woman on the platform watching offered Yvette some advise. Yvette was wearing a red paisley raincoat, and the women commented: “I saw your red raincoat on the other side. And now you are wearing the same coat.” She told Yvette to tell the policeman that her mother and her were on holiday and did not realise that they had crossed into the occupied zone, leaving their permit in the unoccupied zone where they were vacationing. The police officer, for some reason that Yvette chalks up to luck, allowed them to cross.
The next week, the French police rounded up 13,000 Jews--men, women, and children--at the Veldrome d’Hiver. Yvette remembers learning that the mothers were later separated from their children. This haunted Yvette for years.
The entire family almost made it. In Lyon, no one knew they were Jewish. Yvette tried to reclaim the normal life she lived before the Occupation in Paris. She took violin lessons downtown in Lyon and attended public school. Her father worked at a radio store. But even in the free zone, things were not anything like before 1939. Gestapo soldiers patrolled the area outside of their apartment every day, checking cars for fleeing Jews from the occupied zone. However, they never checked inside the houses.Throughout the war, they stayed up to date on the war updates through access to the BBC radio station. By May 1944, they knew the war was coming to an end. Yet as changes occurred outside of France, things continued to grow worse in their everyday reality. Roundups became more frequent and killing occurred in the streets as well. On her way to violin rehearsal, Yvette witnessed the Gestapo kill someone. When she got home, she begged her father to stop going into town. He ignored her. Up until this point her family’s story was, as Yvette recalls, “not typical.” Ephim was caught by the Gestapo on August 7, 1944. On his person included the ID card with the address of the house in the suburbs of Lyon. Ephim managed to scrawl a letter and give it to a boy on the streets to warn Yvette and Rose to hide. On receiving the letter, Yvette and Rose ran Yvette's doctor's office. He took the mother and daughter in. Yvette hid inside her doctor's medical examination chair while the Gestapo and French police searched the office.
Having heard the news of Ephim's arrest, Yvette's cousin Eva went to the radio shop owner to inform him that Ephim was in Montluc Prison. The owner had a contact in the prison and arranged for Ephim to be released and shot as a gentile. The last train from France to Auschwitz, however, left before the deal could be arranged. On August 11, 1944, Yvette's 12th birthday, Ephim boarded convoy no 78 to Auschwitz singing the Marseillaise. On the train, Ephim convinced a guard to send a note to Lyon reading "I am going to Geka." Somehow, Yvette and Rose received it. From the letter, they understood that Ephim must be travelling to Drancy. However, the train never reached Drancy. Due to Allied bombing of train tracks as a part of the post-D-Day liberation campaign, the train turned East and travelled directly to Auschwitz. In Auschwitz, Ephim lived in block 13A. He remained in the camp until its liquidation in January 1945. He was then sent on a death march from Auschwitz to Mauthausen. On entering Mauthausen, he was issued a new prisoner number: 124804. He died two-weeks later in the Mauthausen "hospital" on February 17, 1945 at 1.30pm.
After the War
When the end of the War came in May 1945, Yvette and her mother did not celebrate. Though to the Nazis, the death of “Prisoner 124804” was meaningless, Yvette and her mother were experiencing the loss of a father, a husband, and life as they knew it. After the war, everything was different. The factory that Ephim had owned 55% of was lost to interfamily politics. (Her maternal uncle, Jacob, denied her mother the right to the factory, refusing to give her any of the profit.) Most of the people they had known had been killed—their own survival seemed but a mere testament of luck.
Returning to their home, Yvette and her mother discovered everything but the bathtub to be gone or destroyed. Yet, they decided to remain in France in their old apartment, where Yvette attended a private Catholic high school. Her mother, however, suffered from mental health issues and moved to Berlin leaving Yvette to live alone. In 1951, Yvette packed up all of her belongings and traveled by boat to the United States of America where she moved in with Théophile, her mother’s twin sister. Yvette found work as a typist at Credential Insurance and enrolled at a University in Los Angeles, California. She obtained a Bachelor’s of Arts in French and Spanish and received her teaching credentials the following year.
It was in college that Yvette met her husband, Ivan Schuman, an American Jewish man from Brooklyn, who also, happened to be her Spanish professor. They married and stayed in California while he finished his PhD in Latin American History. In 1956, he was given a job offer from Washington University and they moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where she had three children. The family moved around every few years to a new university. Eventually, Yvette and Ivan divorced. Today, Yvette has seven grandchildren.
In America, her former life seemed distant. She had lost contact with everyone she had known in France before and during the war. No one knew about her past, her traumatic experiences during the German Occupation, and rarely did she offer information. Apart from a brief visit to Berlin in 1964 to visit her mother, Yvette never returned to Europe.
She felt grief, but not anger. However, her community in America knew how to keep her encouraged. Everyone around her was thoughtful and kind, which protected her from becoming overwhelmed with negativity or bitterness about the war. When asked how she survived the Holocaust, Yvette simply says, “Because I was lucky. I was surrounded by people all along who veered me right.”
Today, Yvette lives in an assisted living place in Delray Beach, Florida. She is 87-years-old.
Created by Mckayla Warwick (C'20) and Cassandra Jobman (C'21)