Emanuel R. Holocaust testimony (HVT-3321) interviewed by Levana Frank and Anita Tarsi

Videotape testimony of Emanuel R., who was born in approximately 1911 in Moscow, Russia. He recounts a pleasant pre-revolution life; his bar mitzvah in 1924; emigration to Paris after Lenin's death; his family's Zionism (his father purchased land in Palestine in 1925 where he lives today); attending boarding school; marriage in 1927; French military enlistment; his daughter's birth; posting to the German border in 1939; retreating during German invasion; traveling to Vichy with an admiral; military discharge; reunion with his wife in Toulouse; registering as a non-Jew; joining the underground; working in the family business in Narbonne; fleeing to Marseille with other underground members; obtaining false papers for his parents; living in Italian-occupied Nice, then in Aix-les-Bains; organizing a network to smuggle Jewish children to Switzerland; coordinating with Eclaireurs and MJS; working with Robert Gamzon, Simone Lévitte, Gerhart Riegner, and the mayor of Annemasse, among others; his sister's arrest while smuggling children (she perished in Ravensbrück); smuggling Leʾo Kohen's family (Kohen was caught crossing to Spain and did not survive); transferring his wife and daughter to Geneva; reuniting families after the war with assistance from OSE; and emigration to Israel in 1953. Mr. R. discusses many Jews and non-Jews who financed or aided the smuggling and the continuing impact of his sister's death (he attributes his father's death to learning she had not survived).