We Survived ... At Last I Speak

This is the true story of Leon’s and his sister Rachel’s escape from the Holocaust in Occupied France. In 1942 gendarmes arrested Leon’s parents as Jews, and two French neighbors generously offered to watch the children “until they returned.” Leon’s parents never returned, so their downstairs neighbors, Henri and Suzanne Ribouleau, gave Leon and Rachel a home and sheltered them through roundups, threats, air raids, and privations war. The courage, sympathy, and dedication of the Ribouleaus stood in strong contrast to the collaborations of the French authorities. Leon and Rachel each came to America after the war, but kept their strongest family ties to “Papa Henri and Maman Suzanne,” whom Yad Vashem honored in 1977 as “Righteous Among the Nations”. Leon’s story speaks at last of the courage and love that sustained him, against a backdrop of tragedy, fear, prejudice, and the greatest moral outrage of the modern era. It is a story of goodness surviving evil again and again and again.