Rose-Helene Spreiregen was born in in Paris, France, where she experienced steadily increasing persecution of Jews during the Nazi occupation beginning in She and her grandmother escaped the city and survived the war hiding in a small town in southern France, where they had to forage food from the forest. My family had emigrated from Poland in the late s because of rampant antisemitism and violent attacks against Jews. Unfortunately, they separated when I was an infant, so I lived with my mother and grandmother and sometimes in foster homes.
When I was five, my mother sent me to live in a boarding school for Jewish children in the small town of Louveciennes in the western suburbs of Paris and I went to school in town along with the other children. Because my mother couldn't afford the cost of the boarding house, I sometimes had to leave Louveciennes and return home to Paris. Fearing bombings and gas attacks the authorities in Paris decided to evacuate the elderly and children. So it was that I, along with my grandmother and younger cousin Bernard, was sent to Savigny-sur-Brave, a town well southeast of Paris.
During our eight months in Savigny-sur-Brave, my cousin and I went to school and life had the semblance of normality. The roads soon became filled with refugees fleeing Nazi occupation in Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and western France. They brought with them whatever they could, their belongings packed onto bicycles or carriages or horse-drawn wagons. German attack airplanes often strafed these columns of refugees in order to cause congestion and chaos, obstructing the mobility of the collapsing French army.
It was during that time that my mother came to visit, but in one of the air attacks she received a wound in her foot. The journey was extremely difficult as we navigated roads packed with people and avoided bombing air raids by sheltering in ditches along the road. Towards the end of , all Jews were required to register themselves with the French police, who were collaborating with the German occupiers.
In May , the French police began arresting and deporting Jewish men of foreign nationality, including a number of my uncles and cousins. They were detained in internment camps at Compiegne, Pithiviers, and Beaune-la-Rolande for over 13 months before being detained at Drancy and transferred elsewhere. By every Jew, six years of age and older was issued three yellow Stars of David, inscribed with the French word for Jew, "Juif.
