Greenwich man opens up on eluding Nazi clutches during Holocaust - GT
Greenwich
has a far different story to tell than his mother and older brother,
who endured the horrors of Nazi concentration camps.
The one thing they do have in common is -- through miraculous good
fortune -- they all managed to become survivors.
Vock, 76, former president of Alliance Francaise of Greenwich, has
never publicly told his tale, his escape from the fate of nearly
75,000 French Jews -- including more than 11,000 children -- deported
to Nazi death camps.
In the early 1940s, Vock and his family, including his mother and
grandfather, brother, sister, aunts and uncles -- his father had died
in 1934 -- moved around France, fleeing to non-occupied areas to keep
one step ahead of the Nazis. They couldn't avoid them for long.
By 1943, the group lived on a farm near Aix-les-Bains, in eastern
France, and shortly after midnight on Dec. 23, there was a knock on
the door. Vock's mother, Marguerite, his 14-year-old brother,
Philippe, two uncles and an aunt were taken away by the Gestapo. They
were eventually transported to Auschwitz.
Though the rest of the family was not captured, it was decided that
they could not stay where they were. Help came from Marguerite Warren,
a friend and former employee of the family business, a clothing store
that had recently been taken over by the Vichy government. Warren
decided to take Vock, who was 10, along with his 12-year-old sister,
Dora, and 69-year-old grandfather to her mother's home in Maisons-
Laffitte, a suburb of Paris. It was an enormous risk. Warren's father,
a British citizen, was being detained for being an enemy alien.
"Had she been caught, they would have been deported to Buchenwald,"
Vock said of the concentration camp near Weimar, Germany.
Despite that, she was willing to help the family.
During the train journey to Maisons-Laffitte, Vock said he experienced
one of the most traumatic moments of his life. At the line of
demarcation, the train stopped and a German officer boarded, demanding
papers. Warren handed over the family's forged documents, the
officer's eyes meeting Vock's for what he recalls felt like an
eternity. He then handed the papers back and left.
Vock still wonders what would have happened if the officer had asked
him his name or for other information, thinking they surely would have
been given away.
"That was the closest I came to disaster," Vock says.
Vock has a boy's recollection of the next several months, of attending
school, walking along the Seine and watching films. The family spent
the last months of the war in a small apartment in Mont-Dore, a small
town in central France where there were many Jewish refugees. Vock
remembers being a Cub Scout and attending a Catholic church.
On May 7, 1945, Vock's mother was liberated from Mauthausen, a
concentration camp in Austria. Days later, Vock's aunt waited in the
Hotel Lutetia to be reunited with the family, though not everyone made
it -- Vock lost relatives on both sides.
In the years after the war ended, people didn't speak about the
atrocities that had occurred, or of their experiences, Vock said.
Survivors didn't want to be singled out, they wanted to fit in with
the general population. They also possessed tremendous guilt for
having avoided a tragic fate.
"The feeling of guilt has not disappeared," said Vock, who moved to
the United States in 1951, became a lawyer and settled in Greenwich in
1979. "It still exists."
Vock's mother eventually told her story, but little by little, Vock
says, of laboring at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Philippe, who died in 2006,
spoke about some of what he witnessed in Auschwitz.
"It was more than a death camp," Vock remembers his brother
explaining. "It was a city and a business."
Philippe became involved in Holocaust remembrance activities, though
still held a much darker perspective on that period than Vock. In the
years after the end of the war, during what Vock called the "period of
quietness," Philippe had said they "didn't speak about it because no
one wanted to listen."
But people eventually did listen. Next month, on the anniversary of V-
E Day, Vock will read from a diary that one of his uncles kept during
a death march.
In the ensuing years, Vock maintained contact with Warren's daughter,
Maud.