29. From Comfortable Elite to Despised and Endangered
In 1925, Charlotte Noshpitz was born in Paris into a Jewish immigrant family, the father from Belorussia, the mother from Romania. One of her grandfathers was an anthropology professor, and Charlotte was raised in an intellectual household whose routines included a weekly salon that often hosted French luminaries of the letters, sciences, arts, and academia.
Then life took a nosedive, when the Germans defeated France in 1940. The collaborationist French Vichy regime enacted discriminatory laws that revoked the French citizenship of naturalized Jews, and authorized the internship of foreign Jews or the restriction 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.