The Heschel School

Paul David Cohen was born in Saida, Algeria, on March 20, 1928 to Mimoun, a saddler, and Aisha, a seamstress. In August 1938, Paul moved to Paris with his parents, two older siblings, Giséle and Roger, and Mimoun’s mother, Meha, to get Roger treatment for polio. A third sibling, Simone, had married a Moroccan and lived in Oujda, a city in the Northeast of Morocco near the Algerian border.

In August 1939, Mimoun was summoned by the French government to work in a parachute factory and Giséle was recruited to replace a male school teacher who had joined the army. As the fear of war mounted, the family sent Meha back to Algeria. Officials of their neighborhood, the 9th arrondissement, decided to evacuate women and children to the village of Souvigné-sur-Même in the Sarthe region, three hours from Paris by train. Paul and his family were housed on a farm, where city officials fed them and the other refugees.

In September, Aisha was sent to live with the Souchet family in the nearby town of La Ferté-Bernard; Paul and Roger boarded at school there, while Giséle was sent to another village in the Sarthe region to teach.

In June 1940, one month after the German invasion of France, Paul spotted a dirty, thin stranger with a gas mask hanging from a strap across his chest, biking toward the home of the Souchets. It was his father. Mimoun had been on a train heading to work in a military factory in Chollet, when it was bombed by the Germans. Mimoun continued on to Chollet, and later that month Paul, Roger, Giséle and their mother were evacuated along with the entire town of La Ferté-Bernard to Saumur, on the Loire river. The school there was destroyed three days after they arrived.

The following month, Philippe Pétain’s Vichy government sent all refugees back to their hometowns, and the family returned to the 9th arrondissement. The boys enrolled in their old public school but by 1941, restrictions on Jews began and they had to wear the yellow star. Giséle and Aisha scraped together a living as seamstresses, Mimoun was forced to work in a German factory, and Paul became the family cook. He and Roger were admitted to technical school, which they attended as long as they could; friendly neighbors on the route to school would alert them if they needed to hide. The family managed to evade numerous roundups, often sleeping in the basement of their building, thanks to the kindness of neighbors and the guardian of their building, who would warn them of impending danger.

In 1943, Giséle went to live in hiding with an Austrian family in Paris for whom she made dresses. In May 1944, Paul noticed Allied planes flying over Paris, and was filled with hope. The following month a neighbor rang his doorbell and shared news about the D-Day invasion, which they celebrated with tremendous joy. That August, Paris was liberated. Paul had a belated bar mitzvah later that year, and his grandmother returned to France from Algeria. Paul became an engineer specializing in particle physics, eventually conducting research at Paris-Sud University in Orsay.

In 1952, Mimoun bumped into a former neighbor from Saida, Isaac Benguigui, who had recently moved with his family to Paris. The two quickly arranged a match between their last unmarried children, and Paul and Ginette Benguigui married the following year. They had three children, Nicole, Martine and Pierre. Paul passed away on January 21, 2003. He was the grandfather of Heschel parent David Rak and the great-grandfather of Heschel students Noémie Adelia and Léa Paule Rak.