by amy hunter
ap
bristol, tenn. | Fred Jarvis walked out of his bedroom recently carrying a nearly 700-page book. His aged hands trembled as he dropped it on a family room table with a thud.
The book was heavy with the weight of the 300,000 names it contained — every French Jew killed in World War II.
For nearly 40 years after escaping from a concentration camp in France, Jarvis had no idea what happened to his parents. When this book was published in 1983, he finally knew.
“It’s excruciating being without parents, without family, and thinking about that every day of your life,” he said. “But I finally found out they were killed the day they arrived at Auschwitz in 1942.
“It’s the only memorial I have.”
For the last 25 years, Jarvis has slept with the book tucked carefully in his bedside table.
Jarvis and his wife, Mary, moved to Bristol, Tenn., about 15 years ago. They live in a brick home decorated from floor to ceiling with pictures of family and loved ones.
Recently, Jarvis was recognized in a traveling museum exhibit at the Carol Reece Museum at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tenn. The exhibit, called “Living On,” features Tennesseans who survived the Holocaust and were willing to tell their stories.
Jarvis was living in Germany in 1940 when the Nazis came to his home and arrested him and his parents. His brother, nine years his senior, had escaped to England the year before. The family of three was loaded onto a cattle car and taken to Gurs, a concentration camp in France.
“We were Hitler’s experiment. The German Jews were the first to go,” he said.
For two years, they survived on a daily ration of two ounces of bread and soup that Jarvis described as “dishwater.”
“I remember too much. Nothing but horror and starvation.”
The night before the family was to be shipped to Auschwitz, a 17-year-old girl approached Jarvis’ mother. The girl worked for OSE, an underground Jewish organization that helped rescue children in France.
The girl told Jarvis’ mother that her son might not survive Auschwitz. She offered to take him away that night and ensured it was his only hope for survival.
His mother bravely relinquished Jarvis to the girl. His parents were killed the next day.
Jarvis was given a new name, papers and a new history. He was placed in the care of an elderly couple under the cover story that he was their nephew.
“I knew that I was Jewish and that I was being hunted because of it, but I didn’t know what being a Jew was,” he said. “I was old enough to know it was a war, and I never thought it would end. It had an infinity to it.”
When the war ended a few years later, Jarvis went to live with his aunt in New York City. She was the only one of his father’s 12 brothers and sisters who survived the war.
Jarvis said he knew he was home the second his feet touched the shore. He was 11 years old and spoke only French. His aunt spoke only German, and English was the only language spoken at the elementary school he attended. But he managed to assimilate eventually.
Jarvis spent 14 years in the Marine Corps and worked as a pastry chef in New York City for 40 years. The 72-year-old moved to Bristol with his wife to be closer to her family, and got a job at King Pharmaceuticals, where he still works today.
In 2004, he invited Elie Wiesel, a Nobel Prize winner and concentration camp survivor, to come to Bristol. Wiesel agreed, and spoke before a packed house at the Paramount Theatre on State Street.
“They treated us like animals,” Jarvis said of the Nazis. “But we never became animals. Every one of us became productive human beings and raised families.”
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California