In a series of articles on the survivors of the Vél’d’Hiv Rafle, published in M Le Monde magazine in July 2022, was told the story of Bernard Kryger. This Parisian Jew was 5 years old when, at the beginning of the summer of 1942, he was entrusted to family friends, the Horowitz. The latter took him to the corps (ille-et-vilaine), where they had a country house.
The little Bernard was thus able to escape the arrests of July 16 and 17, 1942. The kid had only kept very vague memories of his Breton stay. He only remembered having been baptized, this Catholicity certificate being supposed to protect him from anti -Semitic roundups. He then received in the second name, that of a teenager, Yves, who became his godfather. The latter’s mother was a neighbor of Horowitz, whom he called “Aunt Aimée”, in whom he often played.
Some time later, Bernard left Body-Nuds. He crossed the line of demarcation to find his mother and his two sisters, who had fled the capital in turn – the father had been arrested the previous year, then deported without return to Auschwitz. The Kryger took refuge in Dordogne, in Peyzie, with a family of peasants, the Boussaria. André and Elise Boussaria will hide them until the liberation and will be awarded the title of righteous among the nations on August 21, 2013.
When she discovers M, Juliette Soulabaille, 82, honorary mayor of corps and passionate about the history of her town, launches research on the protagonists. “It didn’t say anything to anyone,” she says. Outbuilding, she ends up finding the baptismal act of Bernard in the parish registers, dated August 15, 1942, the day of the Assumption. He bears the name of Yves, the godfather, and consequently of the “Aimée Aimée”: Priac. The mother and the son are dead, the aunt loved in the post-war period and Yves in 1993. But Juliette Soulabaille finds the daughter of Yves and the granddaughter of Aimée.
Annick Priac is now 70 years old. The story of Bernard Kryger was an unsaid family. Only his mother had vaguely mentioned before her, in 2009, this fact of war, shortly before her death. “She just told me that my grandmother had kept a Jewish child and that it was a secret.” As if the Gestapo could still knock on the door. “My father, of which I was very close, never told me about it. I guess, for him, all this was normal. As for my grandmother, it was a silent.” Inherited from the album Family, Annick had fallen on the photo of a child, standing next to loved a hen. She did not know the identity of this boy. Mystery resolved in mid-November 2022, thanks to Juliette Soulabaille.
On the initiative of the honorary mayor, Bernard Kryger returned to Corps-Nuds, of which he became an honorary citizen during a small ceremony organized at the town hall. He found the house where he took refuge. He recovered a copy of his baptismal act and a double of the photo. He especially met Annick Priac, who told him about Yves and Aimée. So many lights on his journey that came up in his head. “These reunion have completed my story a little,” sums up the octogenarian.