Twins tells 5 Towns their Shoah experiences
More than eight decades after they were hidden as Jewish children in Nazi-occupied France, twin brothers Henry and Bernard Schanzer stood before a packed sanctuary in Lawrence on April 13 and delivered a message that was at once deeply personal and urgently contemporary: remembrance is not optional.
The 90-year-old brothers told the Greater Five Towns Holocaust Community Yom Hashoah Commemoration, at Congregation Beth Sholom, of a childhood shaped by terror, loss and survival.
Their testimony traced a path from Belgium to Vichy France, from orphanages and farms to eventual refuge in America — while warning that the antisemitism that nearly destroyed their family has not disappeared.
“Unfortunately, antisemitism remains epidemic and is increasing,” they told the audience. “We must make sure that it does not happen again — never again.”
Born in Belgium in 1935, the Schanzer twins were just 5 years old when Nazi Germany invaded the country on May 10, 1940. Within days, 13 members of their extended family crowded into a small van and fled south ahead of the advancing German army, enduring aerial bombings as they made their way toward France.
Their family eventually settled in Saint-Étienne, in what became Vichy France. For nearly two years, the brothers said, their parents managed to shield them and their older sister, Anna, from the worsening realities of the war. They attended summer camp, took family photographs and even vacationed in the French countryside.
The brothers displayed some of those images, and said that the innocence they captured only underscored the enormity of what would soon be lost.
“We show these pictures to underscore the cruelty and inhumanity of the Nazis and their helpers who murdered one and a half million such innocent children,” they said.
A new normal
That fragile sense of normalcy ended in the summer of 1942, after the roundup of more than 10,000 Jews in Paris sent fear through Jewish communities across France. Jewish immigrants who had dutifully registered with French municipal authorities years earlier suddenly found those same records turned against them.
“The registration turned out to be a trap,” the brothers explained, noting that French police now knew exactly where Jewish families lived.
Their parents sensed danger and moved quickly to protect their children.
In August 1942, the 7-year-old twins were sent away to stay with Gentile acquaintances in the countryside. Their sister and cousin were sent to a boarding school in Lyon. The brothers vividly remembered the final moments with their father, Bruno, at the bus station.
“He placed each one of us on his knee, he kissed us and he hugged us,” they recalled. “Then suddenly everything started shaking. He was shaking. We were shaking. Our father was crying.”
They never saw him again.
On Aug. 26, 1942, French authorities carried out a roundup of Jews in Saint-Étienne. Bruno Schanzer, along with multiple relatives, was arrested and sent first to a transit camp and then deported on Sept. 2 to Auschwitz aboard a convoy of people packed into cattle cars. Only 30 survived.
“Our father was not among them,” the brothers said quietly.
Their mother, Bella, narrowly escaped arrest that same day after bribing a French policeman who had identified her at a bus depot. Returning to Saint-Étienne, she found their apartment already seized and learned that much of the family had been taken.
From there began a desperate and shifting series of hiding places that would keep the children alive.
Moved and moved again
The twins were first placed with a couple who quickly grew cold as the danger intensified, then were turned over to police in Saint-Étienne and held effectively as hostages in a Catholic orphanage while authorities searched for their mother. There, they were marched to church daily, given rosaries and expected to assimilate into Catholic life.
Yet even as children, they instinctively clung to their Jewish identity.
“When everybody concentrated on counting the rosary beads, we would mumble under our breath, ‘G-d save us, G-d destroy them’,” they recalled.
After roughly two months, rescue came in dramatic fashion. Acting on Bella Schanzer’s request, members of the Jewish rescue organization OSE quietly removed the boys from the orphanage during a walk to church, simply taking them by the hand and leading them away.
“There was absolutely no noise,” they said. “We just walked away.”
What followed was a succession of lifesaving interventions by righteous non-Jews who risked everything to protect them.
The Schanzers repeatedly paused during their speech to name those rescuers, insisting their story could not be told without them: Madame Jeanne Bonhomme, a Saint-Étienne dress shop owner; her mother, Adolphine Dorel, known affectionately as “La Mémé” (grandma); and Count Xavier and Countess Marie-Francoise de Virieu, members of the French Resistance who sheltered members of the family in their castle.
“We owe our survival to righteous Gentiles of blessed memory and our resourceful mother,” they said.
Bonhomme helped Bella obtain false papers and a new identity, then secured work for her at the marquis’ castle. When the twins’ sister and cousin were endangered at boarding school, the marquis arranged to bring them there as well.
Meanwhile, the boys were moved to La Mémé’s isolated farm in Saint-Pal-de-Mons, their fifth refuge. There, amid sheep, a cow, no indoor plumbing and nights of hunger, they slowly found a measure of stability.
The brothers described La Mémé as “wise and worthy,” a woman who shared whatever little food she had and fiercely protected them as her own.
Whispering in G-d
At night, hidden under blankets, they whispered the Shema prayer until they fell asleep — their only remaining tether to their parents and to Judaism. One morning, hearing the murmurs, La Mémé asked what they were saying.
“We told her we were saying a prayer,” they recounted. “She asked, ‘Why don’t you teach it to me and we will all say it together’?”
It was one of many moments in the address when humor and tenderness briefly cut through the darkness. The brothers frequently traded lines and teased each other throughout the speech, offering flashes of levity even as they recounted trauma.
They joked about childhood photographs, arguing over who got the better clothes, and laughed over their inability to distinguish weeds from vegetables on La Mémé’s farm.
That interplay made the testimony feel less like a formal lecture and more like an intimate family remembrance — two brothers helping each other carry memories too large for one voice alone.
Their survival remained precarious until the war’s closing months. In late 1943, after another Jewish child hiding in the area was denounced and arrested, La Mémé rushed the twins into the woods overnight while German forces searched nearby.
They were not finally reunited with their mother until August 1945. Their father never returned. Neither did many aunts, uncles and cousins.
Finding a home in USA
In 1946, Bella Schanzer brought her four surviving children to the United States, settling on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The brothers described their mother as a determined 45-year-old widow who “worked very hard to provide for her family” and emphasized education above all else.
That insistence shaped the rest of their lives.
Henry Schanzer became an attorney. Bernard Schanzer became a physician and later served as a captain in the US Air Force Medical Corps during the Vietnam War. Their sister became a French teacher.
In 1980, Yad Vashem posthumously recognized Jean Bonhomme and La Mémé as Righteous Among the Nations, honoring the women who had saved them. The brothers said Bonhomme herself was astonished by the praise, insisting she had done “nothing exceptional, nothing extraordinary — only what was right.”
That phrase, they suggested, remains the moral center of their story.
“Ordinary men became mad,” they said of the Holocaust. “Most of all, we must emulate the righteous among the nations. We must have the same moral compass.”
The brothers closed not with despair, but with a challenge.
Displaying photographs of their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, they called their thriving family “the revenge” — living proof that Hitler failed to extinguish the Jewish future.
Still, they stressed that survival is not enough. Memory must lead to vigilance, and vigilance must lead to action.
“We are allies,” they said. “We will do what is right. We must make sure that it does not happen again.”
