The two women tearfully embraced in the lobby of a posh San Francisco hotel. They drew no attention. Why would they? Both spry and elegantly dressed, they would easily pass for standard-issue American seniors living the good life.
But Denise Damenstein Schwarzbach and Suzanne Karpman Cohen are not like other American women. After the hug, they immediately began chattering away in French.
Schwarzbach and Cohen were childhood friends in pre-war Paris whose lives were ripped apart by war. Many of their relatives, including their parents, died in the Holocaust. Separated by war and tragedy, the two hadn’t seen each other since 1945.
On Feb. 15, the two were reunited for the first time. Life turned out pretty good for both: Cohen married a U.S. diplomat and lived all over the world, ultimately settling in Washington, D.C. Schwarzbach married a civil engineer and moved to the Bay Area decades ago. But for both, the past is as real as the present.
“It’s been 60 years,” says Schwarzbach, seated in her Daly City living room with her friend next to her, “but it’s as if they haven’t gone by.”
They met when both were 6 years old, at L’Ecole Commercial de Tourtilles in the Paris suburb of Belleville. In the 1930s, that was a working class Jewish neighborhood, but both women remember being taunted for being Jewish. “They called me ‘yopine,’ or dirty kike,” recalls Schwarzbach.
They went everywhere together: to the park, the movies, to each other’s homes. But with the Nazi invasion and pro-German Vichy government, the Paris they knew disappeared, and hardship became their daily bread.
“The French police knocked on our door,” remembers Schwarzbach of the fateful day they came to take the family away. “My father begged the inspector not to take me. I begged my father not to be left behind.”
Miraculously, she was left behind. But Schwarzbach never saw her parents again.
Cohen suffered a similar fate: With her father, and later her mother, deported, she was left behind at age 14 with her younger brother to look after.
Unlike roundups in other Nazi-occupied countries, in which nearly every Jew was shipped to a concentration camp, the Jews of France suffered only one major roundup, on July 16, 1942, which seized 60,000 Jews. Many of those not snared in that event managed to survive.
Among them were Schwarzbach and Cohen, who didn’t see each for the duration of the war. Cohen went from a Red Cross shelter to an orphanage before being taken in by a Jewish family. Schwarzbach found work in a restaurant, which solved her food and shelter concerns.
“The survival instinct took over,” says Cohen. “There was no time for tears.” Adds her friend, “I did not know from one day to the next if I would be taken. You lived on high alert all the time.”
Finally, in August 1944, Allied forces liberated Paris. From far-flung points in the city, both girls could hear the pealing bells of Notre Dame. They saw each other one last time, briefly, in 1945, but Schwarzbach doesn’t remember the meeting.
After the war, Schwarzbach tracked down an uncle who lived in Marshall, Texas. He invited her to join him there, and after three long years of red tape, she sailed on the U.S.S. Washington to New York, then took the train to Marshall, pop. 35,000. She was 19 and spoke barely a word of English.
Cohen stayed in Paris, living with the same kind-hearted family that took her in during the war. She found work with an exporting company, studying English in her spare time. One night at a dinner party, she found herself seated next to a shy American junior diplomat named Herman Cohen.
“I showed him how to eat an artichoke,” she recalls, “and in gratitude, he married me.”
Her husband went on to a career in the foreign service, with posts in France, several African countries, and later as assistant secretary of African affairs at the State Department. The couple had two children, and Cohen became an American citizen.
So did Schwarzbach, who met her future husband, Al Schwarzbach, in Houston. He was a young civil engineer, swept off his feet by the fetching French beauty. The couple married and moved to Daly City, which in the early 1950s was practically a one-horse town. The couple had three children, belonged to Congregation Beth Israel-Judea and built a happy life for themselves.
But over the years, Cohen wondered what might have happened to her childhood friend. She started with a call to the Red Cross, which offered a search service. Because both women were U.S. citizens, it didn’t take long for the two to get in touch last November. They then began to plan their reunion.
Despite losing their families and enduring the hell of Nazi occupation, neither woman feels bitter about the past. “We could be bitter,” says Cohen. “We just turned out to be normal people.”
Both have been back to France several times over the years. On a trip last summer, Schwarzbach made a pilgrimage to her old school in Belleville, the sight of so many happy memories. There, affixed to the wall, is a plaque noting that on that site many Jewish schoolchildren were deported to their deaths, with the assistance of the French government.
But Schwarzbach and Cohen were not among them. They survived and thrived, raising children who went on to lead full, Jewish lives. And as a capper, two schoolgirl friends, who never asked to be separated by war, have found each other again.
“All who survived were pure miracles,” says Cohen. Adds her best friend sitting by her side: “The fires cannot be killed.”