Archives exhibit explores ‘Rescue as Resistance’
- Laurie D. Babcock
- November 29, 2023
- Wilson G. Bradshaw Library
- Contributors: Katie Cribbs, Video
6 – minute read
Ask Melissa Minds VandeBurgt and her team about their newest exhibit at the Wilson G. Bradshaw Library Archives, and you’ll get more than one answer. It’s about a guerilla network saving Jewish children during the Holocaust. It’s a love story. The main characters are ordinary people who would later be revered by a nation as resistance fighters. The cast features an untold number of children who realized letters stopped coming from their parents long before they understood they’d been orphaned.
However, the backdrop of the exhibit titled “They Were Children: Rescue as Resistance,” which opened Nov. 1, is clear: The story unfolds in 14 houses during the occupation and subjugation of France by the Nazis from 1940 through August 1944.
And VandeBurgt, head of University Archives & Special Collections at Florida Gulf Coast University, is determined to faithfully present the history.
“These were ordinary people who did extraordinary things. And we’re storytellers, so what else do you do but tell the story?” VandeBurgt says.
To tell this story, she and her team of archivists and students spent several weeks in France earlier this year researching the Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE) or Children’s Welfare Organization. The OSE hid and rescued Jewish children in France during World War II.
“People were being exterminated,” VandeBurgt says. “Those are the moments when people must choose to do the right thing. Those are the lessons of the Holocaust that I think are the most valuable.”
This storytelling journey started with a 2020 archives exhibit, “To Life: The Liberation of Ravensbrück,” and Paul Bartrop, professor emeritus of history at FGCU and former director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Research.
About the exhibit
What: “They Were Children: Rescue as Resistance”
When: On display through March 31, 2024
Where: Wilson G. Bradshaw Library, University Archives & Special Collections, Room 322
Bartrop had supported the Ravensbrück exhibit through the center and had given VandeBurgt a copy of his book “Heroines of Vichy France: Rescuing French Jews During the Holocaust.” This 2019 book motivated VandeBurgt to write a proposal that enabled her team’s research trip to France.
VandeBurgt and her team took a similar journey to Sweden and Germany for the Ravensbrück exhibit. Both research trips were funded through the Seidler Benefaction and the College of Arts & Sciences. She calls the new exhibit a “spiritual successor” to the 2020 exhibit. For each trip and exhibit, she and her team became a fount of knowledge about the time period and people they researched.
One of the student archivists on the Ravensbrück trip was Bailey Rodgers (’19, anthropology), who now works as an archives coordinator. She was also part of VandeBurgt’s France team.
“In our research, looking at German-occupied France and Europe in general, we knew it just kept getting tighter and tighter for Jewish people because they had nowhere to go and nobody would take them. Anybody who didn’t fit the Nazi Aryan ideal faced adversity, and then we saw how people came up with some really ingenious ways to help,” Rodgers says.
Through Bartrop’s book, oral histories and a list of OSE member names, VandeBurgt and her archivists discovered how the OSE members, without modern communication like cellphones and email, coordinated efforts. It started, the archivists learned, with one of the clandestine networks in Bartrop’s book — the Circuit Garel.
“I remember getting chills when we finally figured it out,” says Emily Murray, coordinator of library projects in the archives. “We had their names, but how did they interact, where was the interaction between them, how did they all get involved?”
Murray talks about a web of OSE members and how they connect to one another. Those connections, along with a treasure trove of photographs and archival material on loan from multiple overseas museums and the Holocaust Museum and Cohen Education Center in Naples, will be on display at the exhibit.
One especially poignant item on loan from the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris is a short-sleeved dress with a yellow Star of David sewn on the chest, the badge Nazis forced Jews to wear. The dress belonged to Tauba-Thérèse Szmukler, who was born in Poland. In 1943, when she was 13, she and her mother were deported from France to the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland, where they were killed.
Resistance groups were active throughout German-occupied France, providing the Allies intelligence on German defenses and actively working to sabotage the Germans. In August 1942, when children were being deported throughout France, including from the still-unoccupied zone, the OSE focused on evacuating children from the camps.
With the help of everyday people, like artists, educators, social workers and farmers, the OSE placed children in homes and non-Jewish institutions or smuggled them out of France. The OSE members understood that the survival of the children was the ultimate form of resistance against the oppressive force seeking to eliminate them.
“They understood ‘otherness,’ which I think is something that really resonates in the United States right now,” VandeBurgt says.
She hopes her archivists and visitors to the exhibit take away an understanding that “we’re not superheroes. We’re all just average people, but we can make choices to be better.”