By Dan Bloom
CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — I wasn’t searching specifically for this story, and I did not know the reporter’s byline until recently, but while surfing the internet last week for some news about France, I stumbled, happily, upon Cindy Mindell’s nice touch-your-heart story about the power of “thank you” and the redemption of souls.
“Joseph Kleinhandler was 10 when his mother put him on a train filled with children bound for summer vacation on a farm in …northeastern France. That day on the platform in the summer of 1942 was the last time the two would see each other.”
That’s how Mindell of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger started off her news feature. After scanning the headline and the subheadline — ”A Belated Thank You” followed by ”Fairfield County woman makes a pilgrimage to a French abbey,” I was hooked.
I immediately wanted to know more about a Jewish woman from Connecticut travelling to a French Catholic abbey in 2014 to say “thank you” for something that happened there in 1942. I kept reading, and then reached out to the reporter by email to find out more about the genesis of her very good — and important — article, and one worth sharing here with readers of the San Diego Jewish World.
When I asked Mindell about the genesis of her story, she replied to me in internet time, across the seas: ”Wendy Swain, a resident of Stratford, Connecticut, and Joseph Kleinhandler’s first cousin, contacted Connecticut Jewish Ledger editor-in-chief Judie Jacobson after returning from the abbey trip to France and proposed the story idea. Our editor was captivated and assigned the article to me. Thanks for passing along Wendy’s beautiful story to your readers there.”
But before we go any further, please click on this link [http://www.jewishledger.com/2014/12/belated-thank/] and read the Connecticut Jewish Ledger article first.
As reporter Mindell explains it, Joey Kleinhandler grew up in France before World War Two, the only child of Polish-Jewish immigrants to a town in northern France near Lille. One day, at the height of the troubles for Jews in Nazi-occupied France, he was taken to a safe shelter among Christians and hidden away for two years until France was liberated.
Kleinhandler was accompanied by a French representative of the local Red Cross, who secreted him to the Abbey of Valloires in Argoules, 55 miles west of his family’s home in Lens. If this sounds like the beginning of a French or a Hollywood movie, it could happen one day because the backstory resonates, even today.
Mindell wrote, adding the main key to the story: “The property had been purchased in 1922 by a [French Catholic] nurse awarded for her service during World War I to house a preventorium for pre-tubercular children. Now, with the Nazi invasion of France, she had instructed the Red Cross in Lens to send Kleinhandler and two other Jewish children to be hidden at the abbey among the 350 ill young residents.”
Kleinhandler spent the next two years there under the name of ”Joseph Petit,” Mindell reported, with his true identity known only to the preventorium director and three staff members.
This is what grabbed my attention: “He attended the required daily Mass and Sunday-evening vespers services, excelling so well in catechism classes that he was asked to teach the other children. Rather than allow him to make First Holy Communion and convert to Catholicism, the priest in charge had Kleinhandler help the organist pump air into the organ during Mass.”
I right then and there saw a movie screen pop up in front of my eyes, with an international film by a director like the American Steven Spielberg or the Frenchman Claude Lanzmann.
The kicker hit me hard, where Mindell noted:: “In 1944, when the First Canadian Army liberated France from the Nazis, Kleinhandler made his way back to Lens, where he learned that his parents had been transported to Auschwitz along with more than 500 fellow Jews from the town.”
Do read Cindy Mindell’s original report online. It’s a testament to Jewish memory and the Jewish soul.
A happy ending? Yes!
Fast foward to the future that awaited little Joey Kleinhandler after the war, as Mindell tells it:
“[Once in America, he] learned English, earned an accounting degree from the University of Connecticut in 1954 and married. The family moved to California in the early 1970s, where Kleinhandler became [a music distribution executive] at Warner Communications in Los Angeles.”
Kleinhandler passed away in 2001 at the age of 78. Z”l.
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Bloom is a freelance writer and inveterate web surfer based in Taiwan. Readers’ comments may be placed in the space below this article or the author may be contacted directly via dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com
Yes, Danny, definitely a heartwarming story. It proves what I wrote you once some years ago. While in WWII Pope Pius XII would not lift a finger to help the Jews; and instructed his clergy to do likewise and stay out of politics; many priests disobeyed the orders of “His Unholiness” and helped Jews wherever they could. In fact, some 2,000 brave Catholic priests in Germany were arrested an wound up in the Dachau concentration camp.
Peter Kubicek