Gestapo Slip-up Saves Lives of Aged Jews in France; Villagers Sheltered Fugitives

Eighty-five aged, feeble Jews who were deported to this city from Germany over a year ago are alive today dust to a slip-up somewhere in the usually efficient Gestapo machinery. Most of them are German Jews, but a few are French and Belgians who had been deported to Germany and inexplicably sent back here and forgotten.

Sixty-five of then have been living in a public home for the aged here while the other 20 were scattered in private homes in the countryside. They were provided with food and other supplies by the underground Jewish organization. The inmates of the home wept with joy, laughed and prayed yesterday when a representative of the committee drove up openly and began unloading supplies.

The story of how another 40 Jews were saved from death by the villagers of the Alpine town of Almont was told to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency correspondent today by Edmund Kahn, who was a Jeweler in Paris. The villagers sheltered the Jews for more than a year without disclosed their presence even when the Nazis occupied the town during a week-long drive against the Maquis in the area, he revealed.

The situation of the Jews in Lyon, which a JTA correspondent has just visited, is less clear than in Grenoble. Since complete order has not yet been established there, most of the Jews have not abandoned their false identification papers and come out into the open. It is impossible, therefore, to estimate what proportion of Jews are still alive there. As a group of American correspondents came into Lyon they were greeted with the words, “We are very glad to see you here. We have suffered very much.” The speaker was a young Parisian Jew named Alfred Haguenauer whose family has been hiding there for three years.