Marie-Anne H.
Second Generation

When I was a little girl, I heard stories around the dinner table from family members about what happened during the Nazi German occupation of Paris, home of my mother’s family. My Grandmother has always been my hero, as she helped to save approximately 300 Jewish refugees escaping to Free France using the family Hardware Store basement.

Check out Marie-Anne's website which includes more information on her grandmother Celine Morali, schools at which Marie-Anne has spoken, and resources for rescue and resistance in France during the Holocaust. 

Marie-Anne’s grandmother Celine grew up on the border of France and Belgium at the turn of the century. After WWI, Celine, a Catholic, married Rene Zrais Morali, a prisoner of war in Germany who came from a large Jewish family. Rene set up an army surplus business with his younger brother Gaston. When he married Celine, they renamed the business ROMO and made it into a hardware store.

Celine gave birth to Marie-Anne’s mother Simone in 1923. Simone was 17 at the start of WWII. During the war, her mother had her baptized as a Catholic to help obscure her half-Jewish heritage. They lived in a working class community on the southeast corner of Paris.

Simone’s father Rene went into hiding during the war. He moved to their family’s summer cottage in a small town south of Paris. Because he spoke excellent German from his imprisonment during WWI, he was able to make friends with the German officers who were stationed at the village of Servon. He liked to play cards, gamble, and drink at the café. He never wore his yellow Star of David and was able to hide by not hiding.

Celine, Simone, and Simone’s younger brother Louis remained in Paris, living above the hardware store. Celine joined a “reseau” of the Resistance headed by a train engineer, Fuhmann. The hardware store basement became the last stop on the secret journey of 300 refugees into free France. The train would carry five or six Jewish refugees from the neighborhood and from Eastern Europe. At night, Monsieur Fuhmann would escort his passengers into the courtyard of the ROMO Hardware Store, where they would enter the store through a back window and go directly into the basement. They would stay hidden for a few days, and then were smuggled out of the store and back onto a train that took them through the demarcation line at Chalon-Sur-Saone where they went into hiding in Free France.

Celine, suspected by the Gestapo, was picked up twice for questioning. The Gestapo officers didn’t know what Celine was doing exactly, so they were forced to let her go. Once, they pushed her out of a moving car.

Simone was a member of a youth branch of the Resistance movement, relaying messages and maintaining secret correspondence when she was 20 years old in 1943. She was also a member of the FFI, as were her mother and brother. Though they were all part of the Resistance, they kept this information secret from one another. After the Germans were routed from Paris, each family member pulled out their FFI arm bands, shocked to learn each was involved.

After D-Day and the liberation of Paris, Simone met Marie-Anne’s father Hy Kritzer, a GI.

Marie-Anne shares this story of courage and resistance as a member of the Holocaust Center’s Speakers Bureau.

Why did Grandmother put her life and her children's lives at risk? Harboring “criminals of the 3rd Reich” was punishable by imprisonment, deportation or execution. My Grandfather was a Jew, her first husband was killed by the Germans during the First World War, she had an intense hatred of the occupiers, and if you asked her, she would tell you she did what she felt any good French citizen would do.