A desperate slap—a mother’s last act of love—may have saved Rachel Jedinak’s life.


 Rachel was just eight years old when she, her 13-year-old sister, Louise, and their mother, Chana, were arrested in Paris in 1942. That week, the French police, following German orders, rounded up about 13,000 Jewish men, women, and children.


As the three of them waited in a holding area, Chana saw a chance for her daughters to escape. She told Rachel and Louise to leave through an exit.


“I don’t want to leave you,” Rachel cried, refusing to go.


For the first time in her life, Chana slapped Rachel. She needed her daughter to understand—she had to run.


“We had to grow up quickly,” Rachel said many years later. She now understands the painful sacrifice her mother made in that moment. “We were no longer children.”


With the help of kind police officers who looked the other way, the girls escaped.


The Vél d'Hiv roundup was the biggest arrest of Jews in France during the Holocaust. The name came from the Vélodrome d'Hiver, a large indoor sports arena where many Jewish prisoners were held. Most of those taken were immigrants, not French citizens.


Chana, a Polish Jewish immigrant, was later sent to the Drancy internment camp and then deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau on July 29, 1942.

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