>> This is James Newberry,
and I'm here with Ed Francell on Wednesday, July 9th,
2014, at the Sturgis Library, Kennesaw State University.
Mr. Francell, do you agree to this interview?
>> Absolutely. Glad to talk to you.
>> Thank you. Would you please state your full name?
>> Edward Gilbert Francell,
F-R-A-N-C-E-L-L. Our family name
was before the war was Fraenkel,
F-R-A-E-N-K-E-L, and my father changed it.
>> And when and where were you born?
>> I was born in Paris, France.
>> In what year?
>> 1934.
>> Mr. Francell, what did your parents do for a living?
>> My father was a salesman for
fabric company, and they made dresses out of
those fabrics and other things
like that and curtains and things.
And my mother was, I guess you'd call her a housewife.
>> And could you tell me a little bit
about your early family life, what you remember?
>> I was born in 1934
and I grew up in a nice section of Paris.
In Paris, they have what they call
arrondissement which are zones.
And we lived in one of the better ones,
they were always proud to be in the 7th arrondissement.
So we grew up there and I didn't go to school much there.
I don't remember going to any school because I was
four years old when we talked about coming to the US.
>> Could you describe
your mother's connection to the United States?
>> My mother was actually an American citizen,
but she was born in France because my grandfather,
her father, was named Alfred Rothschild.
He was born in Columbus,
Georgia, not too far from here.
And the house that he was born in
still remains there, and I visited.
And therefore, by the fact that
she was born of an American citizen,
she became an American citizens, too.
>> And talk about her family, the Rothschilds.
>> The Rothschilds were not the
exclusive Rothschilds that you've heard about.
They were just the plain run-of-the-mill Rothschilds,
but that doesn't mean they were paupers or anything.
They were pretty rich people too,
but not nearly as much
as the ones you've heard of, probably.
>> And your grandfather
made his way to New York or the entire family did.
And then why did he migrate back?
>> They moved to New York
from Columbus during the Civil War,
or as they call it here,
the War of Northern Aggression.
But they came to New York in 1865.
And actually, my great grandfather had been captured
by the Yankees and removed from the scene.
My great grandfather in Columbus was
a owner of a cotton mill
that made uniforms for the Confederacy.
He and his brother, my great grandfather
and my great uncle were
both captured and taken away to the north.
And my great grandmother
brought the whole family in
a covered wagon and they went to Washington,
DC first looking to see if they could
find out where their father was.
And they were directed to go
to New York because New York was where they had
big prison camps for
the captured rebels. And they did find him.
>> And what was your grandfather Rothschild's full name?
>> Simon Rothschild was
his brother and Frank Rothschild was his name.
So he and his brother, Simon
lived in the same house in Columbus,
and they both owned that mill jointly.
>> And then your grandfather immigrated to France?
>> Well, he did. In late part of the 19th century,
he was a playboy kind.
He wasn't very big entrepreneur,
but he was, you
might call him the black sheep of the family.
But his first wife had died in New York,
and he wanted to see
Europe and he wanted to travel the world.
So he said, I'm going to Paris.
And there he met a French woman who was my grandmother.
And they lived there more or
less happily ever after until World War II.
>> And what was her name?
>> Marguerite Blume, B-L-U-M-E.
>> And their children?
>> They had two children. One was
my mother and the other one
was my aunt Yvonne, her sister.
My aunt Yvonne was born in 1898.
My mother was born in 1902.
>> Mr. Francell, what role did
your Jewish faith play in your childhood?
>> I can't remember anything.
As a matter of fact, I didn't
even know we were Jewish until after World War II.
I had no idea.
My father, which you'll hear about maybe later,
lost his brother who couldn't come with us
because he was not an American citizen
or relative of one.
He was killed in Auschwitz.
And then my aunt Yvonne who was my aunt
on my mother's side was
also captured and taken to Auschwitz,
but luckily she came out.
>> So would you say your parents weren't practicing?
>> They weren't. No. And my grandmother Blume,
she was almost an agnostic
or at least even almost an atheist.
She said, I don't do religion and that sort of thing.
I remembered her doing that.
>> So did you experience anti-Semitism?
>> No. The only thing that
maybe I did experience it was later and when
I went to a summer job in Maine but
1955 when one of
the owners of the hotel was asking
me about a friend of mine who was named Peterson,
and he would say, is he Jewish?
He said, we don't allow Jews here.
I said, well, I don't know if he's Jewish.
I don't even know if I'm Jewish.
And that's basically was kind of a revelation to me.
>> So what did your parents tell
you later about the political,
the social climate in France at this point, 1934-1938?
>> Nothing. My father didn't want to hear about it.
He didn't want to talk about it.
He was so angry at the Germans for killing
his brother and also for
deporting his sister in
law that he didn't want to talk about it.
He didn't tell me anything.
I didn't find out until one day I was reading a book,
and then there happened to
be a German passport in the book.
And I saw it. I said,
that's my father's name, but it wasn't Francell.
It was Fraenkel. I said,
how come we were Fraenkel?
I thought we were Francell?
My father had the poor insight, I call it,
to change his name only a little where if he could
change it to Farnsworth or something like that,
then I wouldn't have made any connection at all.
But that's what happened and I
found out pretty much on my own.
>> So when did your parents and did
you have any awareness of
the rise of the Nazis in Germany?
>> No. Not at that time.
Now, of course, I've read everything.
But at the time, I didn't.
Even after the war, I didn't know too much about it.
>> So at some point, though,
there was a decision made to leave France behind?
>> That's right. After Kristallnacht,
which was November of '38, I believe.
And my father had already talked about leaving, I think.
And when that happened,
he said, I've got an idea.
My mother, my wife is an American citizen.
We might be able to get out through
her, and he was right.
>> So when did you leave?
>> We left in February of 1939.
I forget the name of the ship.
I think it was the America, but I'm not sure.
>> And your arrival?
>> We arrived in New York.
Of course, where most of the ships were going,
but we didn't have to go through the immigration.
Since my mother had an American passport,
we just came right in with everybody else. The non-Jews.
>> And what do you remember of that?
>> Not much. Because it was I was only 4.5 years old.
I remember we moved to a little suburb
in New York called Cedarhurst,
which is near what they call now Kennedy Airport.
It was called Idlewild Airport
at the time. That's all I remember.
>> You later moved to California?
>> We did. About two years later,
my father had an opportunity
to buy a dressmaking factory.
And he had some money, and my mother had
some money, and they invested it
with another partner in this dress company.
And he bought that. It was actually
called Classy Lass Dress Company.
>> And where was that located?
>> Downtown Los Angeles.
>> So talk to me a little bit about
growing up coming of age in Los Angeles.
>> Well, first of all, they chose
to live in a Jewish neighborhood,
even though they didn't want to be identified as Jews.
But they they sent me
to a school that was about 80% Jewish.
And I was told I was now an Episcopalian,
and I went to the Episcopal Church in Hollywood.
And they didn't tell
me I was Jewish and nobody really hinted at it.
And then I was told
that I was going to be going to that church,
and that was fine with me.
And when they sent me
to Fairfax High School in Los Angeles,
which is now ethnically quite different.
But at the time, it was about 80-90% Jewish.
I said, no, in September,
when the Jewish holidays come around,
nobody was in school.
I said, where are all the students?
He said, they're celebrating the Jewish holiday.
I said, how come, you're not there?
I said, well, we're not Jewish,
which is what I knew at the time.
So that's what I learned
and I kind of put things together after that.
>> And what was Hollywood like in the early 1940s?
>> Hollywood was still pretty, pretty glitzy.
We lived near Beverly Hills,
which is still a very beautiful neighborhood.
And they didn't have any of
the stars on the sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard,
but we were actually in the Los Angeles district,
and Hollywood is actually a separate district,
but it's connected, it's part of LA.
And I had a friend who lived
in Hollywood and he was not Jewish.
He was a refugee also from Belgium.
But because we spoke French,
we got along pretty well.
>> And what do you remember of the war at that point?
>> I remember we were camping out.
My parents had a tent and we went to Lake Arrowhead,
which is about 40 miles east of LA near San Bernardino.
It's up in the mountains.
And one day, they said, the wars over.
I said, oh, that's great.
But that's not the whole war.
It's only the war in Europe.
They said, there's another war going on in
Japan or in the Far East. So I said, okay.
But I figured the war for us was over,
but it wasn't, of course,
you know what happened after that.
The Japanese gave up later,
and then the war was really over in August of 1945.
>> Did you do anything with your school or your community
to contribute to the war effort to refugees?
>> Yes. In fact, they filmed us.
We collected pennies.
And in those days,
a penny was worth something.
And everybody go out
and collect as many pennies as you can.
And then we gathered all the pennies
together and I was photographed with a couple of,
I guess we were about 12 years old
at the time or maybe less 11,
and we were counting the pennies.
And then we came up with a grand sum
of $71, all in pennies.
And that was a fortune in those days.
And we gave it to the war effort.
And they called it CARE at the time,
Cooperative American Relief for Europe.
And it was a CARE Package.
They used to send a lot of packages
to Europe and to the refugees.
>> So tell me about
your grandparents in France, your mother's parents.
How did they escape?
>> Well, they stayed in France at the time.
But then when the Germans took over for about two years,
there were two zones of France.
One was the occupied zone,
which included Paris and most of the coast.
And the other part was the Southeast part and
the Riviera and the Mediterranean coast,
which was so-called unoccupied France,
Free France, as they called it.
And my grandfather, as it turned out,
had a summer home down there in
a little town called Cavalaire, which still exists.
I've been there and I've seen the old house.
But they went there. And my aunt, Yvonne,
stayed in Paris,
because she also had a house in Cavalaire,
but she wanted to stay with
her husband who was not Jewish, by the way.
And so they stayed in France,
and then they went down to
their summer house when the Nazis took over,
and they stayed by the beach,
and my grandfather's house in
the same town was a little bit further up the coast,
up into the city.
But then we'll come to that,
but she was captured and deported.
>> And your grandparents,
they eventually had to flee where?
>> They went through Marseille and if you've read a book,
there's a very outstanding American consul
called Varian Fry.
And I'm convinced that they were helped
by that person because he helped a lot of people escape.
And he was the consul in Free France or he was based
in Marseille and he helped them get to by train,
eventually went along the coast
and they ended up for Spain.
They went across the Pyrenees, and they ended up in,
I believe, Madrid, one of those cities,
they being a neutral country, so-called.
And then eventually they got to Portugal,
and they ended up getting
a ship to New York at that time.
And my grandfather was helped by his brothers,
we're all born in Columbus, Georgia,
and he had one sister,
and he was helped by him to get to New York.
>> Were your parents able to
communicate with your grandparents at this point?
>> Limited. During the period when
they were living there when it wasn't occupied,
that would be from '40-'42,
they were able to write letters and everything.
And after that, it was censored heavily.
So there was no communication, basically.
And the other point that I want to make just
real quick is my grandfather on my father's side,
she was living in Paris.
She wasn't able to come with us at all.
And she was hidden or not hidden,
but she lived in a senior citizens, we'd call it home.
And she eventually came out and joined us in California.
>> So both your mother's parents and
your father's mother
eventually came to the United States.
>> And they all ended up in California.
>> Your father's mother staying in
a senior citizens home in Paris throughout.
>> Right. She was there for the whole war.
>> Is there any accounting for how
she escaped the attention of the Nazis?
>> They just never came for her.
And I don't think anybody, I guess,
ratted on her, would be the word we used today,
but nobody denounced her
as the word they used in those days.
So she just had to stay indoors and she
couldn't go very far from where she was.
And unfortunately, she became
very overweight just by being sedentary like that.
>> Did your grandparents,
your mother's parents talk to you
ever about that escape through the mountains?
>> I read about it, and my grandfather
told me a little bit, but not a whole lot.
I figured it out and they told me to read some of
the letters that my grandfather had written, which I did.
>> Talk to me about your aunt,
Yvonne, who was living in Paris.
And what did she do for a living?
>> She was a ballet teacher, dance teacher,
and she had a studio in one of
the nice buildings of Paris.
And when she left,
she had to leave that behind when she went
to the riviera as Americans call it.
We call it [FOREIGN]
>> And when was she deported to the East?
>> Well, she wrote a book about this.
She was captured in Cavalaire
and taken to Marseille or Toulon,
which are the two cities that are right
on the coast there.
Then they eventually came to Paris and there was
a book written about some of
the camps that were in Paris, also,
which we have a copy of now by this Jewish scholar,
young man like you,
and he teaches in France and he also teaches in England.
He's perfect in both languages.
And he wrote about the camps in Paris,
which were Austerlitz,
which is a former railroad station,
and they had a former department store where
they took all the goods that they had plundered and
arranged them in settings
where the Germans could
come and pick out what they wanted for their home.
And then there was a third one and I
can't remember the name of the third one
off the top of my head.
But then eventually,
they were going to start taking the people away.
And in 1944, June,
she was taken to Dranse,
which is a suburb of Paris,
basically the North side of Paris,
and she stayed there for a couple of months.
And then eventually about
July or June 30th or something of 1944,
she was on one of the caravan trains
that took them all to Auschwitz,
and you'd probably talk
to people who have been on those trains.
And she was on there and she got to Auschwitz
about six days later.
>> And what can you tell me of her experience there?
>> Well, from what I've read in her book,
first of all, she was a ballet dancer.
That's important because she
was in good physical condition.
And she was like, I would say 46 years old,
she was born in 1898, so 46.
And what they did is you've probably seen
the movies and things where they
sent people to the right and to the left.
Well, she went through
the selection process and they wanted to send
her to the right,
but she wanted to go with
her friend who went to the left.
Her friend was frail and not very healthy looking.
But Yvonne being ballet dancer and in great shape,
they said, we want you to the right because you can
work for a while.
And that's how she escaped death.
>> And what did she say about liberation from Auschwitz?
>> Well, first of all,
she knew that the Russians were coming.
The Russians were the ones that liberated
Auschwitz in January of 1945,
and they knew they were coming because they heard from
the underground inside the camp
that the Russians were coming this way.
And she said, if I can only make
it until they liberate us and she did.
And she was always finding ways to get out of work.
She would kind of back
off when they were selecting people to go to work.
She knew how to slide to the back of
the group and avoid work.
So some of the days she just
spent on the latrine basically.
The latrines were very basic.
I've been to Auschwitz and I've seen them.
They just basically a rack of holes,
and they went there
and she was able to stay there and avoid work.
And so she wasn't tortured or she wasn't worked to death,
but she did lose a lot of weight.
When she was there, her original weight was probably 140.
She was 5'7" tall.
And when she finally came out,
she was like 85 pounds.
>> So where did she go when
she finally came out of Auschwitz?
>> First of all, she was on a death march
where they took all the prisoners out.
The Nazi soldiers wanted
to get them out and take them back
to Germany because they thought they could
get some more work out of them or something.
And so they all left in a caravan and
the people who couldn't keep up basically were killed.
If there was somebody who fell down, you're dead.
She was able to keep going and she was able to run
along with the people at the front of the line
because she was healthy and the other people
, they were out of luck.
And then maybe one day or two days after that,
they noticed there were no Germans around.
And they realized that they
were taking off and they went somewhere else,
and they never came back.
And so she was basically free,
and they were walking towards a town near Auschwitz,
a big town called Katowice,
K-A-T-O-W-I-C-E, which I've been to also.
And that's where they were found by people.
They went door to door and saying,
we're escapees from Auschwitz and could you help us?
They finally knocked on the door of a Catholic convent,
and I have a picture of the Mother Superior that said,
we have to take this woman in.
Actually, she had her friend with her,
they were both Jewish,
but they were both taken in and
these wonderful nuns took her in.
And they nursed her back to health,
and they were able to basically
keep her alive for three or four months.
And then eventually they were found by
the International Red Cross.
>> And when did you meet your aunt Yvonne?
>> Well, I had met her when I was four years old,
but I don't remember her.
I met her when she eventually came to California
and came to Los Angeles where we
lived and they moved into
an apartment with my grandfather,
and basically her mother and father,
my grandfather and grandmother,
and she had a separate bedroom in that apartment.
And they moved in there.
We lived about maybe six blocks away.
So I met her actually the first time at that time.
>> And when did she start speaking about her experiences?
>> She she showed me her number almost immediately.
She said, that's how they
identified her and her number was
A 6161 or something like that,
and I have a picture of it.
And she said, that's how they identified us,
and she didn't tell me a whole lot about what happened.
I got most of it out of the book that she wrote.
>> And did she
have some trouble getting that book published?
>> She did. She tried to get a lot of
people in New York that she
knew publishers some of the big ones today,
even one that related to
our family Strauss and
company and they wouldn't publish it.
They said, we've got too much of that stuff right now.
Everybody wants to publish this so she was disappointed,
but she kept the manuscript,
and it took myself
and my daughter and a few other people when it was found
in Paris by this author Jean-Claude,
I believe, Jean-Claude Dreyfus.
And he's a teacher, as I said,
at Manchester University and
also at the Sorbonne in Paris.
And he said, We need to publish
this. Somebody needs to publish.
So they published it in French and to this day,
it's still only published in French.
We have the English translation,
but we would like to get it published
in English as well, and we're trying.
>> So let's return to your childhood and the war ends.
And so when did
you become aware of the atrocities against?
>> I'd say in the next two or three years after that,
and my father was
so angry that he didn't want to talk about it at all.
My mother told me a little bit about it.
But basically from reading books,
and I was 14,
15 then and I read some of the books and I saw
some of the movies at the time, they were newsreels.
But there was no actual drama
like they have with Schindler's list and those movies.
But later on about two
and my aunt started talking about it herself.
She was in Los Angeles and she
was on a lecture tour within LA.
She would go to Optimist Club and various social groups
and give a presentation and actually get paid
for it, expenses, very little.
But she wanted to spread the word and she kept saying,
if we don't stop
this thing from happening now
there'll be a third World War.
And she was right there has been a but it hasn't
been a World War and that's what she tried to do.
>> So when you began to learn about these events,
how did you relate your family's personal experience
with the more global event?
>> Well, first of all, I had to come to
terms with the fact that I was Jewish,
and I didn't really realize it until I got into college.
But it was pretty apparent to me that we
were part of that tribe, if you will.
And I'm sorry, I missed the point of your question.
>> But relating the personal experiences of your family,
your family members with what had taken place.
>> Well, I read van's book she wrote it.
She had it published, not published,
but typed into a manuscript.
And it was in about 1946, '48,
I'd say when I was
able to read it and understand what happened.
>> And where did you go to college?
>> I went to Columbia University in New York.
>> And what did you study?
>> I studied advertising and marketing,
and I eventually became a marketing research manager in
several different companies ended up here in
Atlanta working for Kimberly-Clark Corporation.
>> And you said discovering that you were Jewish,
what does that mean exactly when
you haven't grown up thinking of yourself?
>> Well, first of all, if I can be very blunt,
I didn't even know what circumcision was at the time.
And I noticed that I guess I was.
And I didn't know what it meant but
then I found out that that's
how they identified at least the men.
They couldn't identify the women because they weren't,
but they certainly could get the men
right out of very quickly.
And so I learned about that and then
I learned that there was
these awful camps like Auschwitz
and Dachau and all the ones that the Americans liberated.
>> So tell me about your family, your descendants.
>> My descendants, I have four children.
My youngest child is 44 or 45.
She was born in Indiana,
I have another one that was born in Muncie Indiana,
and then two of my children were born
in St. Clair, Michigan where we were working at the time.
And so I have a 46-year-old daughter,
a 50-year-old son,
a 52-year-old son, and a 53-year-old daughter.
The only one that doesn't live here is the first son.
>> And your wife?
>> She's living here, too.
She's still in good health.
She's older than I am,
but she's doing well.
>> And her name?
>> Claire.
>> And so you began to do research on
your family and specifically
with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Yes, talk to me about that process.
>> Well, we collected a lot of material.
My wife, I got to give her
thanks for putting it all together.
You've seen the books that I collected that she put
together and you have some of our material already.
And that was very
interesting because that put it all together.
You could see the documents that they had,
the pictures that they had,
the history of the family,
and all going all the way back to
Columbus Georgia in 1864.
Some of those older pictures.
They were one of the first Jewish families
in Columbus Georgia at the time.
>> Have you ever shared
your experiences like this before?
>> Never. Not in this format.
>> And why is that?
>> Well, because I never had the opportunity.
We went to the Holocaust Museum a few times before we
donated all the material to them and
we were interested and we wanted to see.
I've also been to the Museum of tolerance in LA,
which is similar to the Holocaust Museum.
And I just was interested in everything about it and I've
read just about every book that you
can come up with on the subject.
>> So why have you decided to share with us today?
>> Because I believe that we shouldn't forget.
The new generation should understand what happened before
they were born and probably would
never happen to them if they were Jewish,
but at least if they weren't Jewish,
it would would not have happened, I should say.
And if they were Jewish,
it might have happened to them, but they didn't know.
So I wanted to share this with the newest generation.
I'm 80 years old now,
and I won't be around very long
and you've probably talked to some older people than I.
But they're the ones that really can tell you about it
because they lived through it and we didn't actually.
>> Thank you, Mr. Francell.
>> Thank you so much.