14. War Turned This Teenager’s Life Upside Down
In 1925, Charlotte Sorkine Noshpitz was born in Paris to a Romanian mother and a Belorussian father. One of Charlotte’s grandfathers was an anthropology professor, and she was raised in a highly intellectual environment. Her household’s routines included a weekly salon that often hosted French luminaries of the arts, letters, sciences, and academia. However, 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.
By 1942, Charlotte’s father was in hiding, and that year, her mother was arrested in a roundup and deported to Auschwitz. Her father and brother fled to Nice in southern France, and were followed soon thereafter by Charlotte, who joined the local Resistance at age seventeen. After her father stumbled upon her stash of weapons, she arranged false identity papers to get him out of the country – and out of her hair. She led him to believe that she would go with him to Switzerland, but at the border, she bid him adieu as she handed him to a guide who escorted him into Switzerland. His daughter then turned around, and returned to the fight.
