July, 1943. Robert Sommer, a 38-year old Parisian journalist and jurist, is safe and sound in the village of Chomettes, far away from the world and antisemitism. Eight months ago he fled from Marseille, along with his wife Paulette and their three kids.
His friend, Rabbi René Hirschler (who will be arrested and sent to Auschwitz six months later) - who was in charge of Jewish Religious Services throughout France - asks him to assist in the preservation of Judaism and Jews in south-west France, replacing a Rabbi who has gone underground.
There are no facilities, no communities, no resources. Most leaders are jailed or in hiding, many Jews are already in internment camps. He accepts the dangerous job voluntarily, and relocates along with his family to Montauban, where he and his wife will run the operation for 14 months, until after the liberation.
When he returns to Paris at the end of 1944, the family includes six children, with one born in Montauban, and two Holocaust-orphans who still don't know their parents will not return. The family has no apartment, no job, no money and no community. He rebuilds everything from scratch, and three more girls are born meanwhile.
With typical modesty, he almost never spoke of his grand effort, and only after he passed away, the family found the archive of correspondences he had kept, which is presented here in its entirety.
To help exploring the archive, we recorded keywords appearing in each document - including names of people, places or events. To search, enter names (in Latin letters), separated by spaces. You can choose to search documents with at least one of those words (OR) or documents with all of them (AND).
Further reading:
Selected documents from the archive, along with maps and drawings, translated to Hebrew
The notes of Emmanuel Sommer
Books about Robert and Paulette, published by the family:
For a list of all keywords in the database, click here.