Tribute to Annette Muller, survivor of the Holocaust

Memorial of the Shoah/Coll. Samuel Muller

Annette was born in Paris on March 15, 1933. Manek and Rachel Muller, his parents, brothers and sisters live rue des Envierges in Paris 20th district.

When the war breaks out, Annette’s family is evacuated to Saint-Biez-en-Belin (Sarthe) and then returns to Paris at the end of 1940. In July 1942, the director of the communal school came to warn the Muller family about the imminent raid "for Jewish men". Annette, her mother and her three other brothers and sisters are arrested, their father having managed to hide. Manek manages to get the two elders Henri and Jean out of the police station. Annette, 9 years old in 1942, saw the roundup of the Vel d'Hiv and then internment in the camps of Beaune-la-Rolande or Pithiviers and Drancy with her brother Michel and her mother Rachel.

Rachel, her mother, will be deported in August 1942 and murdered at the Auschwitz camp. While their parents were deported, like thousands of other children interned in the Loiret camps, Annette remains alone in the camp with her little brother, Michel, 7 years old.

Annette and Michel are already in Drancy when their names are removed from the list of runners; they are taken to the Lamarck asylum (a house of the UGIF).

Manek learns that the children had been transferred from Beaune-la-Rolande to Drancy. There, he manages to find out from a gendarme that they had just left for the Lamarck asylum.
He goes there and sees children in the yard, their heads shaved, thin, looking for a piece of bread while scratching in the dirt. The director barely lets him enter and tells him: « Be happy that they are there'. On the other hand, the children cannot be taken since coming from Drancy, they are under German control.
Thanks to the help of a nun, Sister Clotilde (who will receive the medal of the Righteous in 1994), he manages to get them out at the end of November 1942 to be hidden at the Catholic orphanage of Neuilly-sur-Seine where Henri and Jean will join them later.

Together, the four children are placed in Le Mans in a home for Jewish orphans.

Annette Muller is the author of La petite fille du Vel d'Hiv (ed. Denoël) her biography prefaced by Serge Klarsfeld: «Manek’s four children survived and Annette became the family memorialist. The story of Annette, the daughter of Manek and Rachel is of a moving intensity, as love for her mother dominated her life as a child; a cheerful, beautiful, intelligent, hard-working, flirtatious and sociable mother. On the day of the raid, the mother begs: Do not take the children.

The Memorial pays tribute to the memory of Annette Muller and extends its most sincere condolences to her family.