Toddler's red leather shoe worn by a Jewish refugee from German occupied France

Alain Markon was born on June 13, 1941, in Touoouse, France, to Jewish parents, Alexander and Raya Magid Markon. Raya was born on June 10, 1910, to Abram and Genya Settel Magid in Vilna (Vilnius), Lithuania, and had a sister, Katia. Alexander was born in 1905 in Lithuania or Russia and emigrated to France in the 1920s. His parents met when Alexander was visiting his family in Vilna. After corresponding, the couple married in Paris on February 11, 1937.

In September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Alexander has served in the French Army in 1927-28 and now was recalled. He served ten months on the Maginot Line. Germany invaded France in May 1940 and, in June, France surrendered. Alexander was demobilized and went south to join Raya who had fled to Toulouse. They applied for visas to emigrate to the United States. Alexander worked as a farm laborer and received lodging as part of his wages. But in December 1940, he was told there was no work for the winter. The American aid agency, Joint Distribution Committee, had been dissolved and their prospects were very bleak. They received their visas in 1942 and booked passage to America aboard the Portuguese ship, Carvalho Araujo. They sailed from Lisbon, Portugal, in late October and arrived in Baltimore, MD, on November 2, 1942. Alain’s maternal grandfather and aunt had been confined in the Vilna ghetto following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Abram was killed that same year by the Germans during an action in Ponary, Lithuania. Katia survived the concentration camps of Kaiserwald and Stutthof and emigrated to the US in 1947. Alain was joined by a sister in the US. Alain, age 57, died in 1998 in France. Alexander, age 70, died in 1975 in New York. Raya, age 95, passed away in 2005, in Washington DC.