Tribute to Annette Muller, survivor of the Shoah

Shoah Memorial/Samuel Muller Collection

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

When the war broke out, Annette’s family was evacuated to Saint-Biez-en-Belin (Sarthe) and then returned to Paris at the end of 1940. In July 1942, the director of the communal school came to warn the Muller family about the imminence of a roundup "for Jewish men". Annette, her mother and three other siblings 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, was deported in August 1942 and murdered at the Auschwitz camp. While their parents were deported, like thousands of other children interned in the camps in Loiret, Annette remained 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 participants; they are taken to the Lamarck asylum (a UGIF house).

Manek learned that the children had been transferred from Beaune-la-Rolande to Drancy. There, he managed 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 ground. The manager barely lets him enter and tells him: " Be happy that they are there". On the other hand, the children cannot be taken since they come from Drancy and are under German control.
With 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 in the Catholic orphanage of Neuilly-sur-Seine where Henri and Jean will join them later.

Together, the four children are placed in a Jewish orphanage in Le Mans.

Annette Muller is the author of La petite fille du Vel d'Hiv (éd. 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, so much the love for her mother dominated her life as a child; a cheerful, beautiful, intelligent, hardworking, flirtatious and sociable mother. On the day of the roundup, the mother begs: Do not take the children.”

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