10. This Future Resistance Heroine Grew Up In One of Paris’ Most Intellectual Homes
In 1925, Charlotte Sorkine Noshpitz was born in Paris to a Jewish family, with a Romanian mother and a Belorussian father. She was raised in an intellectual household – one of her grandfathers was an anthropology professor. Charlotte grew up in a mentally stimulating environment, and her home had a weekly salon that often hosted French luminaries of the arts, letters, sciences, and academia. Little in Charlotte’s background gave hint that one day she would turn to guns and bombs to fight evil, or that she would save numerous Jewish children by smuggling them from beyond the Nazis’ clutches.
Her life took a drastic turn for the worse after the Nazis defeated France in 1940. The collaborationist Vichy regime enacted discriminatory laws that revoked the French citizenship of naturalized Jews, and authorized the internship of foreign Jews or the restricted of their residence. When out in public, Charlotte and her family were forced to wear yellow stars of David sewn to their clothes to identify themselves as Jews.