Two babies, two disguises

Mark spent his early years as a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl in the Bedzin and Srodula ghettos, where deportations to Birkenau were a constant threat.

His mother dressed him as a girl so that he could move unnoticed in a world that hunted Jewish children. He survived the ghetto, the deportations and the chaos of escape and was finally liberated near Auschwitz.

My story took place in Vichy, France. I was born with forged papers, baptised under a false name and raised as a girl so that no one would suspect the baby in the pram was a circumcised Jewish boy.

My father was active in the Resistance. He was arrested by the Gestapo in Nice in April 1944, imprisoned in the Hotel Excelsior, sent to Drancy, and then deported on Convoi 73 to the Baltic states. He never came back.

Mothers who refused to surrender