Dolls Snatched From Doomed Jewish Sisters Were Poignant Reminder of Holocaust
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
By Thea Glassman September 20, 2016
Two dolls taken away from Jewish sisters during the Holocaust found a home with a French family — for three generations.
Denise and Micheline Levy, 10 and 9 at the time, were being lined up in the French village of Gemeaux, when a gendarme grabbed the dolls and threw them on the ground, the Telegraph reports.
A family in the village took the two dolls home, one in a pink dress, another in a blue.
“None of us ever played with the dolls. We knew the story,” Frederique Gilles, whose grandmother first found the dolls, said. “Our family tried to find out what happened to the two girls, but they never came back. We were unable to trace any relatives.”
Gilles decided to turn the dolls over to the The Shoah Memorial in Paris last week, saying she felt wrong passing them down to her four-year-old daughter.
“It wasn’t easy to give them up but it was the best thing we could do for the memory of those little girls,” she said.
Thea Glassman is a Multimedia Fellow at the Forward. Reach her at [email protected] and on Twitter at @theakglassman.
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