For most of his life, longtime Naperville resident Isaac Levendel had no idea what had happened to his mother, Sarah, after she disappeared from where they were living in rural France in , when he was 7. They were both registered Jews under the Nazi-collaborating Vichy regime, so he assumed the worst. But it would be 46 years until Levendel felt ready to hunt for the details. But the bureaucrat, in a private act of kindness, sent him a copy of the card in a plain brown envelope without a return address, as if it were pornography.
Levendel learned that his mother had been sent by cattle car to Auschwitz, where, an eyewitness reported, she was killed in a gas chamber. For decades a Naperville computer engineer was tormented by the disappearance of his mother in France during the Holocaust. His search for clues took him into the yellowing, secret archives of Nazi-occupied France β and shed light on a shameful chapter of French history.
By Peter Hellman. O n a fine late-spring day in , a Jewish boy named Chaim Levendel waved goodbye to his mother, Sarah, in a cherry orchard in southern France. Then she turned and walked toward the road to make what was to be a two-day trip to town. The day was June 5, , the eve of D-day. Six hundred miles away, Allied troops were preparing to claw their way onto the beaches of Normandy, launching the liberation of Europe.
But for seven-year-old Chaim, the day became momentous for a different reason. The Holocaust, which had spread its poison to France under Nazi occupation, was about to take Sarah Levendel.
Although he had no way of knowing it as he watched her walk away that day, Chaim had just seen his mother for the last time. Today Levendel lives with his three children in a comfortable home in Naperville.
