Marie Jucht Kaufman papers

Marie Jucht Kaufman (1930-1994) was a French-Jewish Holocaust survivor. Her son, American writer and artist Alan Kaufman (born 1952), has written of the lasting effects being a survivor had on her and her family in his memoirs Jew Boy (2000) and Drunken Angel (2011).

Marie Jucht was ten years old in 1940 when the French government fell to the Nazis. The Vichy Government persecuted Jews through anti-Jewish legislation and propaganda. Their movements monitored and restricted, Jews were banned from many public places like parks and cinemas. Jewish children were prevented from attending school, and business owners' stores were vandalized and closed. Jews were required to wear yellow Stars of David on their clothes, emblazoned with "Juif” (“Jew”). Hannah Jucht, however, kept one set of clothing for each of her family members without the stars, which would later save her and Marie's lives.

Marie Jucht, her parents, and three brothers narrowly avoided arrest by the French State during the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup on July 17, 1942, in Paris. Over July 16-17, French officers arrested 13,000 foreign Jews living in Paris—many of whom were women and children. (Those arrested were temporarily held at the Vélodrome d'Hiver, a bicycle track arena, before being sent to concentration camps; the arena's nickname, Vel' d'Hiv, became associated with the mass arrests.) More arrests and deportations to concentration camps followed: by the end of September 1942, nearly 38,000 Jews in and around Paris were arrested and deported to Auschwitz.

Marie and her family fled south across the Demarcation Line into the French Free Zone, which in 1942 was still under the control of the French government. It was illegal for Jews to cross the Demarcation Line, and the Jucht family had to circumvent both German and French checkpoints. The Jucht family split up for safety, and Marie hid in a French Catholic girls' school for several months until Nazi occupation began to expand south.

The family later reunited and traveled in secret to northern Italy. In September 1943, the Allies had invaded Italy and in October, the Italian forces declared war on Germany and sided with the Allies. The Juchts and several other families traveled with a convoy of repatriated Italian soldiers across the border into Italy. Between 1943 and 1944, the Juchts traveled through small villages in the Italian Alps, befriending several families whose kindness kept the family alive, despite the danger to themselves and their homes. Marie Jucht became fluent in Italian and served as the family's translator.

The Juchts traveled with a band of Italian Partisans (resistance fights who utilized guerilla tactics) from late 1943 until early 1944. During that time, the Germans began to move into northern Italy and the group saw combat, during which Marie assisted a soldier with a machine gun. The family separated for safety in the aftermath of the fight; Marie and her mother took refuge with a Catholic priest, but her father and brothers were arrested as political prisoners. After the war, Marie Jucht immigrated to Venezuela, where she established a children's clothing factory. Marie Jucht married George Kaufman in 1951 in Mount Vernon, New York. She became a United States citizen in the early 1990s.

Biographical information derived from the collection.