Today, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we remember Jean (Rosen) Magre, Walter Rosen’s beloved sister. Raised in the United States, Jeanne married a Frenchman and gave up her American citizenship. She and Maurice lived in Paris and raised their son Claude there. When the Germans invaded the city, Jeanne—by then a widow—departed for the south of France, believing she could live there safely. She did not. Swept up with others of Jewish ancestry, she was held briefly at Drancy camp on the outskirts of Paris before being deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered in 1943. Jeanne’s name appears in the German Bundesarchiv in the Memorial Book of Victims of the Persecution of Jews under the National Socialist Tyranny in Germany 1933–1945.
Jeanne, however, was far, far more than her brief entry in this book. She posed for photographs. She coached her son to write to his uncle and aunt in America in French and English. She shopped for typewriter ribbon so she could type her husband’s poems for publication. She wrote to Lucie Dodge, welcoming her to the Rosen family in 1914. She played a newly invented electronic keyboard instrument called the “Ondes Martenot.” These are moments from Jeanne’s life that are possible to imagine thanks to the Rosen family archive. Through them, we can imagine Jeanne as a woman full of life, as well as one of the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
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