With arrests accelerating to a frenzy, the Germans needed to move prisoners out of Paris to other camps. Jews, male and female, were mostly transported to Auschwitz via Drancy. But Drancy was overflowing, and tragically, because the Germans had banned Red Cross parcels, the UGIF was forced to take over responsibility for trying to provide better food and welfare and thus was, by its very act of cooperation with the Germans, complicit. The UGIF, although never responsible for preparing deportation lists, did provide a range of services for the Jewish community, knew the whereabouts of many Jews, and housed children in homes known to the Germans which helped facilitate disastrous raids. But its leaders faced an appalling dilemma: if they refused to supply basic provisions such as blankets and shoes as demanded, then Jews doomed to extinction would be sent on journeys to the east under even harsher conditions. The UGIF leaders believed they had no choice and were facing reality.
In March, after she had spent sixteen months in Drancy, the Germans decided it was time to despatch Béatrice Reinach, who was now deported to Auschwitz in Convoy no. 69. She survived there for another ten months until her death on 4 January 1945, two weeks before the camp was liberated. Her mother, Irène Sampieri, who had not been able to save her daughter, inherited what was left of the Camondo fortune but spent it all in the casinos on the French Riviera in the postwar years and died in 1963 aged ninety-one. The beautiful house, proudly donated by her father to the French state, remains as Béatrice’s monument, all that is left of the family today.
Hélène Berr, who had initially worked for the UGIF in their offices, was now increasingly concerned to save Jewish children whatever the personal cost to herself. She took on more direct tasks for various illegal and secret networks, which smuggled Jewish children from orphanages and homes to farms, villages and other places of safety outside Paris. These networks included the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE), the organization founded in Russia on the eve of the First World War to help destitute Jews, and the Entr’aide Fran?aise Israélite (EFI), some of them operating partially within official UGIF cover, others linked to non-Jewish groups. But the problem for these organizations was that they had still not moved their premises out of legal, easily recognized Jewish institutions. Hélène understood that since the UGIF was German-sanctioned, and had in its possession far too many names, her work risked the taint of collaboration, but her robust sense of morality helped her conclude that working to keep children out of the camps took priority over such personal scruples. This was the most important thing she could do. After the UGIF offices had themselves been raided at the end of July 1943, and all forty-six of the employees found there deported to Auschwitz, Hélène redoubled her own efforts, even going into Drancy itself to help with the feeding and welfare of the internees for two weeks at a time. As the historian David Bellos has concluded: ‘About one third of all Jews resident in France were deported and murdered … but only one Jewish child in ten perished in the years of German occupation and that was very largely because of the courage and skill of people like Hélène Berr and the kindness and generosity of a vast network of French well-wishers who took Jewish children and hid them.’ Notwithstanding, 11,400 French children died.