In August 1942, as the Nazis’ net grew ever tighter around the Jews of Vichy France, a Dutch diplomat walked into Lyon’s Palais de Justice and successfully demanded the release of 118 prisoners being held there.
The following day, the same Dutchman, Sally Noach, appeared at the Stade des Iris on the outskirts of the city. He had received a tip off from a police source pointing it out as the place where all the remaining Jews from Vichy’s holding centers were being detained.
Most spoke Polish and Yiddish, and he spoke neither. However, using mime and sign language, he managed to make himself understood.
“I gave people made-up names and fake personal details. I went on writing until I ran out of papers,” Noach later recalled.
In all, 432 people were issued false papers registering them as Dutch and thus securing their freedom and escape from near-certain death.
Noach — who died 40 years ago this month — rarely spoke about his wartime exploits. It is only through the relentless digging and detective work of his children, Lady Irene Hatter, a British philanthropist married to the former industrialist Sir Maurice Hatter, and Jacques Noach, that the full story of his activities in Lyon has now come to be told.
Produced by Paul Goldin and released last year, the resulting feature-length documentary, “Forgotten Soldier,” lifts the veil on a man whose willingness to break the rules ensured that during his lifetime he would never receive the recognition he undoubtedly deserved.
Oxford University Prof. Robert Gildea is one of the many experts interviewed in “Forgotten Soldier.” Says Gildea, “The story of Sally Noach is really a story about rescue and, for a long time, rescue didn’t get much of a seat at the table of resistance because people saw resistance as basically being about sabotaging trains and taking pot shots at Germans.”
“But Jewish resistance and Jewish rescue was a war within the war because not only were they fighting a war against Nazi occupation, but they were also fighting a war against the Holocaust,” says Gildea.
The film indeed credits Noach with saving 600 people. The real number is probably much higher, says Hatter, as that figure includes only those whose names are known. An archivist working on the film, indeed, believes Noach probably rescued at least 1,500 people.
Hatter, however, seems uninterested in attempting to quantify her father’s bravery in this way. “If you save one person, you know the saying,” she responds.
Herman Veder was six when, together with his brother and parents, they were arrested in August 1942 and jailed at the Palais de Justice. Noach secured their release with false identity papers — discovered by Hatter’s brother in an Amsterdam archive — which had altered the family’s religion from Jewish to Calvinist. The papers allowed the family to travel from France through Spain and Portugal and then on to safety in the Dutch colony of Suriname on the northeastern Atlantic coast of South America.
At the end of the war, Veder’s family of 60 was reduced to less than 10 — four of whom owed their lives to Noach.
“Basically, he saved our lives,” an emotional Veder tells Noach’s children. After its liberation, the family returned to Amsterdam, where he recalls seeing, and speaking with, Noach on many occasions. To him, he recalls, he would always be “Uncle Sally.”
