On September 1st, 1939 (some dates are inscribed in one’s consciousness), Germany invaded Poland, and that was the beginning of WW2. It took only five weeks for the Germans to defeat Poland. And Germany then set its sights on conquering France. At that time, France was the only other country in Europe that matched Germany in the size of its army, but it did not match the German mechanized equipment, nor, and perhaps more telling, its planning and daring. France’s general staff still thought like its 19th century planners. France had an impenetrable defensive line on its eastern border, across the Rhine River, where it expected any invasion to take place.

Germany then simply went around that wall, and violating the neutrality of Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Germany was in France before the French army could mobilize itself to respond. Thus, in a matter of six weeks, in the spring of 1940, Germany had defeated France. It would take close to six more years before Germany was defeated by the Allied armies of the US, the UK, and Canada and some volunteers from the occupied countries.

You probably know of Hitler’s obsession to murder all the Jews of Europe. The majority of European Jews lived in Eastern Europe, primarily in Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine, all without the will or the way to resist the Germans. Soon after their conquest of Poland, the Nazis began wantonly murdering the Jews who lived in those countries. Although they later “formalized” this criminal policy, they couldn’t wait to start.

But they did eventually start in France, slowly, in Paris, in 1941. And in January 1942 the Nazis formulated their policy to annihilate all Jews from Europe. As I just mentioned, they had already set this policy in motion in the East, and now in France, which had many less Jews than Eastern Europe. But a Jew is a Jew. A raid on the Jewish community of Paris and its immediate surroundings was set for the early morning hours of July 16, 1942. It started at four o’clock in the morning: 4,500 French policemen, with over twenty-seven thousand index cards, started knocking on doors. In the end, 13,152 Jews were arrested, men, women, and children. And by the way, although it was the Nazis who ordered this raid, it was actually implemented by the French police. Shortly afterward, all those arrested perished in Auschwitz.

Why wasn’t I one of those arrested? It turns out that the plan was not kept a tight secret. My mother learned of it from a dentist – a dentist! This is how it played out. My mother had an appointment with her dentist the day before the scheduled raid. That dentist had a French policeman for a patient who told my mother about the impending raid. Was the French policeman a “good” man? Was the dentist Jewish? Was the policeman just bragging about how much he knew? Would anyone listening to this information believe it? Who knows the answer to these questions?

But, I think I can read my mother’s mind. If this “rumor” is not true, we may have an uncomfortable night elsewhere than in our own apartment. But if it is true, we don’t know what the consequences of being arrested might be. My mother was certainly not thinking in terms of Game Theory, but simply telling herself why take a chance?

Indeed, this raid did take place as scheduled, but that night, our family slept in the home of our cleaning lady. Otherwise, my life would have ended at five years old.