Given the sad news that France now tops the world league table for the number of its Jewish citizens heading off to live in Israel – many citing a rise in anti-Semitism – it is important to remember the bravery that many French citizens showed during the Second World War in saving the lives of Jewish friends and neighbours.
One such story involves a Charente couple, Gabriel and Emilie Fradet, who were living in an apartment block in Paris during the war, where Gabriel was a seed merchant.
They were in the French capital during the terrible days of the so-called 'Vel d’Hiv' round up of Jews by the Nazis on 16 and 17 July 1942.
The Fradets barely knew their near neighbours, Sara Szwarc and her two young children Marguerite, 6, and 12-year-old Munisz.
But they immediately agreed to hide them from the French gendarmes and German soldiers and continued to conceal them for a year and a half.
And thanks to them the Szwarc family saw out the war safely.
When Munisz's son Dan Szwarc, who lives in Monpellier in the South of France, heard about this story from his father a few years before the latter's death in 2012, he decided to do something about it.
And thanks to his lobbying Gabriel and Emilie Fradet have been posthumously awarded (see letter above) the title of 'Righteous Among the Nations', a status accorded by Israel to those who helped Jews during the Holocaust.
However, so far Dan Szwarc has not been able to track down any descendants of the Fradets to receive the award.
Gabriel Fradet, who returned to live in Mansle in the Charente, died in Ruffec on 12 February 1967.
The couple did have at least one granddaughter, Claudine Godard, who was born in 1938.
But Dan Szwarc isn't even sure if she lived in the Charente.
He has now contacted the Charente Libre in the hope that someone will know what happened to the Fradet family.
Understandably he is keen to pay tribute in person to the relatives of a couple without whose bravery he would never have been born.
