Œuvre de secours aux enfants

These children had reached the Vichy zone, usually under very difficult travel conditions, and sometimes with the direct danger that they could be captured by the occupying Germans.

OSE was founded in 1912 by doctors in Saint Petersburg, Russia, as Obshchetsvo Zdravookhraneniya Yevreyiev ("Organization for the health protection of Jews"; OZE), to help needy members of the Jewish population.

In 1933, fleeing Nazism, it relocated again, this time to France where it became the Œuvre de secours aux enfants ("Society for Rescuing Children"), retaining a similar acronym.

These Homes were for Jewish children of various ages, including infants, whose parents were either in Nazi concentration camps or had been killed.

To prepare children for possible future dangers, the OSE teachers paid special attention to physical education and survival skills.

In June–September 1941, Andrée Salomon (importantly, see below) supervised three transports which brought about 350 children from the OSE homes through Marseille and to the United States.

In 1942, the police began round-ups and deportations from the orphanages to Nazi concentration and extermination camps, and the OSE organized an underground network in order to smuggle the children to neutral countries.

After the German blitzkrieg into France in May 1940, OSE now also had to organize the evacuation of children from the Paris area to protect them from bombing.

Of the temporary shelters that existed at the beginning of the war, 14 chateaux-mansions, whether lay or religious, became places where instruction was given in school-subjects, vocational education together with ORT ("Society for Trades and Agricultural Labor,") and in leisure and in sports.

At the beginning of 1942, and integrated with the UGIF (General Union of Jews in France), OSE gradually shifted from philanthropic work to that in support of a mission of humanitarian resistance.

OSE gathered the children together for shelter, and then spread them around to hide them; and then re-gathered them and raised them, with housing, food, clothing, education and sports.

The OSE management location, now provided by Joseph Millner and Valentine Cremer, both of French nationality, now moved to Vic-sur-Cere, which was then in the Italian Zone at Chambéry.

(The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) After the famous "Night of Vénissieux" (near Lyon) in August 1942, during which 108 OSE children were saved from capture and deportation, Joseph Weill used Georges Garel, a French Jewish Combat Engineer, to organize a secret network of escape routes (Underground Railways) for the transport of children.

Despite many difficulties, Garel completed the network, which covered four major regions of the Southern Vichy Zone (except around Nice), and it was operational by the summer of 1943.

From Lyon, Georges Garel coordinated everything, organized the technical infrastructure (false papers, hiding-places, convoys), and managed connections with all the relevant co-workers.

Families, convents and boarding schools were prepared and made ready for the OSE children, whose identity-papers had been falsified, and who had had their ties with their parents cut.

In March 1944 they resume at an accelerated rate, carried out jointly by the OSE, the Sixth (the clandestine circuit EIF) and the Zionist youth Movement (MJS).

OSE management continued to work through periodic meetings in Lyon, at Rene Borel, or in immobilized train carriages.