- Sabine Zlatin
Sabine Zlatin (
January 13 ,1907 -September 21 ,1996 ) was a Polish-born French woman who hidJew ish children during theWorld War II .Zlatin was born Sabine Chwast in a Jewish family in
Warsaw . As a young woman she moved to France, where she marriedMiron Zlatin . With him she ran apoultry farm inLandas in the north of France. Both received French citizenship in 1939.After the outbreak of
World War II , Sabine Zlatin begun to train with theRed Cross . When Germans advanced to France, Zlatins moved toMontpelier , where Sabine Zlatin was posted to amilitary hospital . After the formation ofVichy France government in 1941, she was forced to leave.At the
Herault prefecture in the French-occupied zone, she contacted Jewish children aid association OSE. She helped to have released children that had been interned in the camps ofAgde andRivesaltes .When the Germans occupied the rest of the France in 1943, Zlatin took 17 children with her to Italian occupation zone. Via the recommendation of sub-prefect of
Belley they received permission to use a house inIzieu and founded the Herault refugee children's home "La Maison d'Izieu" ("Children's Home of Izieu) where Jewish children hid.However, on
April 6 ,1944 , theLyon Gestapo , led byKlaus Barbie , raided the house and took away all forty-four of the children and the seven adults who took care of them. Zlatin herself was elsewhere at the time. Forty-two of the children and five of the adults were gassed at theAuschwitz concentration camp , while two of the teenage children and the home superintendent, Miron Zlatin, were executed by firing squad atReval inEstonia .In 1987 Zlatin testified against Barbie in his war crimes trial. The same year she founded an association to create a museum for the Izieu victims. She received support from various sources, including from French president
François Mitterrand . The museum openedApril 4 ,1994 , in the very house that she had used. The Museum is located 60 miles from Lyon in theRhône Valley .Books
*
Serge Klarsfeld - "The Children of Izieu: A Human Tragedy" (1984)External links
* [http://www.izieu.alma.fr Musee Memorial des Enfants d’Izieu (French)]
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
