American honored by Israel had courage to say ‘no’ to evil

Becky Smith bangs her knuckles on the table.

KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK.

“We need the Landesmann children,” she says, sounding stern, channeling the voice of the policeman looking for the young Jews. “Now.”

“Well,” she says, changing characters, speaking softly but firmly, “they’re on their walk. They’ll be back soon.”

“I’ll be back in two hours,” she says, switching again to the policeman, a Nazi sympathizer. “I want them.”

Smith sits at the dining room table Wednesday in her Sea Pines home on Hilton Head Island, more than 70 years removed and a continent away from the story she’s telling about her aunt, Lois Gunden.

Gunden established a children’s home in France during World War II. She helped an unknown number of Jewish children escape the Holocaust. She is one of only five Americans recognized by the state of Israel as Righteous Among The Nations, an honor bestowed on non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. More than 25,000 people worldwide have been so honored.

Gunden’s story will be featured in a Holocaust remembrance service May 1 at Congregation Beth Yam on Hilton Head.

Smith, a non-Jew, will tell the story, one she only recently came to know.

A safe haven

Lois Gunden was one of nine children. She was born near Eureka, Ill., her niece said, and later moved to Goshen, Ind., to attend college.

She studied French.

At Goshen College, she earned bachelor’s degree in the language. She left to pursue a master’s degree in French, but later returned to teach there. She’d taught for two years by 1941, when she volunteered to go to France to establish a children’s home for the Mennonite Central Committee.

Gunden was a Mennonite. She was a pacifist, a conscientious objector. She was 26 years old.

“I don’t believe she had any idea of what she was walking into,” her niece said.

By 1941, the Nazis had already conquered France and installed the puppet Vichy government. Gunden arrived before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, and – against the advice of some – decided to stay.

She lived in Canet Plage – southern France near the Mediterranean Sea, more than 500 miles from Paris, just north of the Spanish border.

She worked at Villa St. Christophe, her niece said, “a summer home” with 20 rooms and “a coal-fired kitchen stove.”

The villa would become a safe haven.

During 1941 a nearby internment camp, Rivesaltes, primarily held refugees from the Spanish Civil War, her niece said.

But in the middle of 1942 things began to change.

Gunden noticed more Eastern Europeans at Rivesaltes. Jews – parents and their children. And she saw they were being starved.

As many as 1.5 million children were killed during the Holocaust, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

So, she would go to Rivesaltes and try to convince parents to give her their children.

It was risky early on, but doable.

It got harder once the British and Americans invaded North Africa in late 1942.

That made, Gunden, an American, an enemy of the Reich.

The first clues

As she sits at her dining room table, Becky Smith remembers the pamphlet.

Smith was in fifth grade, she thinks, when she flipped through the Mennonite children’s pamphlet after Sunday school and noticed the story.

The one about the Landesmann children … and her aunt, lying to the policeman.

“And it’s one of those things I just kind of filed: ‘Oh yeah, (my family was) really worried about her,’” Smith says, remembering her thought that day. “‘They didn’t hear from her in over a year.’”

Smith pauses for a moment, thinking of other potential clues about her aunt.

She remembers visiting Gunden in Pennsylvania, where she’d moved after the war. Gunden had made dandelion salad for her niece. A practical dish born of the weeds beneath her feet.

“Thinking back, she probably learned that you use all things available to you,” Smith says.

Her aunt didn’t talk about France.

Smith recalls overhearing conversations between her father and his siblings about the year Gunden went missing.

A prisoner of the Reich

Gunden wrote letters to her family back in the States.

Many of them dealt with the dull details of daily life, her niece said, though some of them mentioned the children she sheltered. Like the Landesmann children. And Ginette Kalish.

After hiding beneath their family’s shop in Paris in 1942, Kalish and her mother fled south. They were captured by Axis forces and taken to Rivesaltes. Gunden rescued Kalish from the camp.

“I trusted her with my life because I had no one else,” Kalish, 86, said Wednesday in a phone interview.

“I was with (Gunden) about eight months (in Canet Plage). There were about a dozen children. Nobody knew that we were Jewish. And she was protecting us with her life – she would take a bullet for us.”

In January 1943, Gunden’s letters stopped coming.

She’d been taken prisoner and moved to Germany.

A lost story found

Becky Smith looks at the printed pieces of paper that litter her dining room table.

The papers - letters, pictures, a New York Times article - tell the story of her aunt, one she’s known for just a few years now.

It’s a story her cousin happened upon when she was cleaning out a closet. The cousin, Mary Jean Gunden, began researching her aunt’s life. She read the letters Gunden had written, found some of the children she’d saved – Kalish, for one – and contacted Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance and research center in Israel.

Yad Vashem vetted the material, which led to Gunden being honored as Righteous Among The Nations.

Rabbi Brad Bloom of Congregation Beth Yam had already planned to highlight the Righteous Among The Nations in this year’s Holocaust remembrance service.

“How was I gonna make it come alive?” Bloom said Wednesday, remembering the quandary he found himself in – he knew the theme but didn’t know how to illustrate it.

Then, a chance meeting with Smith, who shared her aunt’s story. Bloom invited her to speak at the service.

“There have to be people who say ‘No,’” Bloom said, referring to the non-Jews who defied the Nazis, and referencing one of the themes of this year’s service – the consequences of silence.

Lois Gunden returned home after the war and married a widower. She had step children, but never any of her own. She continued to teach.

The Landesmann children escaped the policeman and survived.

So did Ginette Kalish, who has a 20-month-old great grandchild.

Becky Smith doesn’t know what she’ll say at the Holocaust remembrance service.

Her goal, she said, is for the congregation to begin to know her aunt.

This story was originally published April 22, 2016 at 5:32 PM with the headline "American honored by Israel had courage to say ‘no’ to evil."