Houston’s Survivors

Josette Hart was born June 12,1944, 6 days after D-Day, in Grenoble, in southeast France. Her sister, Jacqueline, was 8 years older. Her mother, Therese, had come as a young woman from Germany. Her father, Joseph, was from a proud French Jewish family. His family had owned 2 kosher butcher stores they lost in the Depression. Three months before Josette was born, her paternal grandparents, Flore and Solomon Ach (“Ahsh”), were murdered in Auschwitz. They lived just 8 miles from Swiss border, but had refused to leave their home.

Josette was born at home; it was too dangerous to venture out. Joseph was away, fighting with the French resistance. The midwife suggested naming the child after her father, as it was unlikely he would return home, but eventually he did.

Their lives were saved more than once due to the courage of righteous gentiles. Once, when her father was demobilized from the French army in the unoccupied zone, a neighbor helped her mother cross the mountains to see him, walking 12 hours. That same man later took 5 year old Jacqueline on the train to join them. When Josette was an infant, all the women and young children from the resistance fighters had to evacuate up into the mountains. Again their life was saved by a righteous gentile, as a man used his cane to drag Josette, in her carriage, up the mountainside.

In 1947, the family received visas and arrived in Chicago, to an uncle who had sent many letters and affidavits to get the family out of Europe, starting before World War II, but to no avail. Her mother had brothers there, as well as Josette’s grandmother who had left Europe on the last boat from Genoa before WWII. Josette was a registered nurse for 50 years working with infants and children.