Eva Rapaport
Gift of Eva Edmands
Id no. 1602.90, Photograph
The Rapaport family fled Austria for France in 1938. Three years later, the family met Reverend L?abbe Claudius Longeray who offered to hide them in his parish at the top of a mountain near the village of St. Martin-Bellevue. For the remainder of the war, Eva's mother Ella and her father Hugo hid in the boiler room of the church and Eva worked as a shepherdess for the parish. They survived primarily on vegetables grown in a small garden near the church.

At one point, the reverend?s brother, a member of a paramilitary organization discovered that he was sheltering a Jewish family and threatened to turn them in to the Nazis. In response, the reverend threatened to turn his brother over to the French Resistance.

After liberation the family remained in the village for another year until conditions improved. Eva attended her first year of high school there before the family moved to Paris in 1946 and to the US in 1948.
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