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Overlooked Important WWII Figures from History

Khalid Elhassan October 20, 2019 31 min

4. Charlotte Sorkine Noshpitz and the Nazis

Charlotte Sorkine’s wartime fake ID. The Forward

In 1925, Charlotte Sorkine Noshpitz was born in Paris to a Romanian mother and a Belorussian father. Her Jewish family were among the educated upper crust, and one of her grandfathers was an anthropology professor. Charlotte was raised in a highly intellectual household, whose routines included a weekly salon that often hosted French luminaries of the arts, letters, sciences, and academia.

Her life took a drastic turn for the worse after the Nazis defeated France in 1940. The collaborationist Vichy regime enacted a raft of discriminatory laws that revoked the French citizenship of naturalized Jews, and authorized the internship of foreign Jews or the restriction of their residence. When out in public, Charlotte and her family were forced to wear yellow stars of David sewn to their clothes to identify themselves as Jews.

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.