“We Wanted to Live” Survivor Francine Taylor

In an interview several years ago, Francine Ajzensztark Taylor recalled her harrowing journey from the time the Nazis occupied Paris in June 1940 to liberation in 1945.

Life was normal at first, but by mid-1941 anti-Jewish laws went into effect. Among other restrictions, all Jews had to register with the German authorities and wear the yellow star. An 8:00 p.m. curfew was imposed.

In June 1942, when she was 13, Francine became ill with a lung disease. Her parents sent her to a boarding house in the French countryside where the fresh air would aid in her recovery. On July 14, her birthday, a messenger from the post office came to tell her she had a long distance call from Paris. It was her father’s cousin’s wife, a gentile woman, who told her that her father had been taken by the Gestapo and her mother and sister were in hiding. The woman wired Francine money for a train ticket along with instructions to meet her mother and sister at an address she provided in the city of Dax on the border of Free France.

Francine rode her bike to Tours to buy a ticket for the train leaving the next day. She tried to register in a hotel for the night, but the clerk suspected she was either a Jew or a runaway because she didn’t have papers. Papers were not required for people under 15. Francine had a ration card, but it was stamped with “Jew.” She spent the night in the train station bathroom.

On the train, Francine was in a compartment with eight people. Suddenly the train stopped in the middle of nowhere. Nazis boarded and began checking everyone’s papers. Thinking quickly, Francine said she was with the gentleman seated next to her. Miraculously, the Germans moved on. She told the man she lost her purse and didn’t want to be mistaken for a Jew.

Francine got off at the next stop, retrieved her bicycle, and began the journey of 650 miles to Dax, sleeping in barns at night, scrounging for whatever she could find to eat. She arrived in Dax a month later, exhausted, hungry, and dirty, having not had a bath the entire time. She went to the train station to board a horse and buggy taxi to the address her cousin had given her.

Outside the station she saw another Jewish family that she knew from Paris. There wasn’t enough room for all of them to ride together. That family took one buggy, and Francine took another one that she shared with two nuns. The other family was immediately picked up by the Germans who stopped them to ask for their papers.

When Francine arrived at the address she was given, she found out that her mother and sister had gone to Toulouse. The next day, two boys led her across fields to Free France. Crossing the border, she was shot by a guard. The bullet grazed her back and she fell to the ground, unconscious. When it was dark, a man awakened her and took her to his home, where she was able to bathe and rest. His wife gave her clothes so she looked like a peasant and sent her on her way.

It took a few more weeks to get to Toulouse by bicycle. Again, Francine scrounged for whatever food she could find. When she got to the address, she found out that her mother and sister were gone. She finally caught up with them at Grauhlet.

For the next three years, Francine, her sister and their mother went from place to place hiding with the help of French non-Jews. They were liberated when a jeep with two American GIs who were lost came to the house where they were hiding.

At the end of the war, they went back to their old apartment in Paris, only to find it occupied by someone else. After a year they of living in a squalid hotel, they were able to move back in. They were also able to retrieve $600 that Francine’s father had hidden in a baseboard. They found out that Francine’s father, who had been in the French Underground, was denounced by collaborators and taken to Birkenau Concentration Camp, where he was murdered.

Francine married an American GI and came to the US in 1950, eventually settling in Charleston, SC. She is 94 years old.

Francine lost 56 close relatives and countless other cousins who were murdered by the Nazis.

Her son, Alan, said he once asked her how she had the will to survive her harrowing ordeal. She replied that “we wanted to live. We did what we had to do to survive.” ■