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Historic Figures Who Set Out to Save Jews From the Holocaust

Khalid Elhassan December 15, 2020 32 min

Hanns Albin Rauter - World War II — A Dutch Resistance cell during WWII. For God and Country

9. After Her Mother Was Sent to Auschwitz, This Teenager Joined the French Resistance

Charlotte Noshpitz’s wartime fake ID. The Forward

By 1942, Charlotte Noshpitz’s father was in hiding. Later that year, her mother was sent to Auschwitz. Her father and brother fled to Nice in southern France, and were followed soon thereafter by Charlotte. She joined the local Resistance when she was seventeen years old.

After her father stumbled upon her stash of weapons, Charlotte arranged false identity papers to get him out of the country and out of her hair. She told him that she would go with him to Switzerland, but when they reached the border she handed him to a guide to escort him the rest of the way, bid him adieu, then turned around and returned to the fight.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.