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We Were There
Southwestern Jewish Press, November 7, 1946:

By Albert Hutler

The following is the first in a series of articles by Albert Hutler, executive director of the United Jewish Fund. Mr. Hutler, who spent many months overseas working directly with displaced persons, the "liberated Jews" should have many interesting and enlightening incidents to relate—Editor

Friday night, my wife and I went to Temple. We sat in the fine opera seats and listened to an excellent sermon. The Rabbi spoke of many of the concepts for which some of us fought and some died. And as he spoke, my thoughts turned to Paris. Not the Paris of the Bal Taberin, or Rue Blondell, or Cafe de la Paix, but to the Paris of the Rothschild Synagogue.

It was the high holidays of 1944, just after the liberation of Paris. A thousand or more American G.I.'s were worshipping in an unbelievably beautiful synagogue. The huge, cathedral-like temple was lit by flickering candles which cast ghostly shadows on the walls. The Chief Rabbi of France, clothed in his white vestments, stood at the pulpit thanking God for deliverance. Behind him stood the Reader, and the Cantor, dressed in the cloth of their office, all praying for their dead, all thanking God for the living.

We saw in the congregation a few hundred French Jews; shabby and seemingly lost. They had just come out of hiding, down from the attics, up from the basements, out of the forests—some of them had not seen the light of day for five years. All carried the look of the hunted and the haunted in their eyes. All remembered their loved ones who had been taken to Auschwitz, to Buchenwald, to Dachau, to Poland to die.  They could tell tales of 85 Jewish infants that were left to freeze to death in a box-car in the railroad yard of Paris; of their own child being torn from their arms to be dashed to death against a stone wall; of the knock on the door which spelled deportation. One girl, now in San Francisco, told us of the day her lovely nineteen year old sister had been beaten until paralyzed and then deported to Poland. Later came an official message advising of her death. No family escaped—all suffered.

But as they sat praying in the Rothschild Synagogue perhaps their minds may have turned to memories of earlier days and the hell of the last four years may have faded; but they can never forget the feeling of being hunted animals.

It is these Jews of France who are being aided by the Joint Distribution Committee through money supplied by your United Jewish Fund. It is their children who are being given a new life because you have made a sacrifice.  Your United Jewish Fund supports the Joint Distribution Committee, the ORT and the Hias which are aiding these people to remake their lives.