OSE home
Le Masgelier near Grand-Bourg (Creuse), France.
September 1942–April 1943
A home away from home under the aegis of the OSE.

In making arrangements for the safety of their two boys with OSE, little did our parents know that, in March 1942, OSE had been incorporated into UGIF and renamed "UGIF-South-Troisième Bureau," and would thus henceforth be under the oversight and control of the Vichy and German-controlled "General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs."

We were, without knowing it, in the wolf's lair. It is probable that the OSE mid-level staff were equally ignorant of this situation.

The old dilapidated castle at Le Masgelier—what is called a "gentilhommière" in France—was home to one hundred children, mostly former internees in French internment camps whose parents, in many cases, had been deported "to the East"—the German euphemism for the death camps. Many had been forcibly evicted from their ancestral homesteads in the Southern German provinces of Baden and Palatinate, which were thus the first to claim to have been made "Judenrein"—free of Jews.

One of the staff—not all of whom were Jewish—had the great idea to get us a mascot, our own mutt, "Masgeliette," the most beautiful dog I ever laid eyes on and got to pet.

Affectionate "Masgeliette" made our motherless misery a little more bearable.