Erich Schwam, a Jewish refugee who arrived in the village with his mother and father in 1943, bequeathed to the commune of central France, according to the notary responsible for his will, a sum believed to be of some hundreds of thousands of euros. .
“We are very honored and will use the sum according to Mr. Schwam’s will,” the city’s deputy mayor, Denise Vallat, told CNN on Saturday.
In the will, dated November 9, 2020, Schwam wrote that he wanted to “thank them [the village residents] for the welcome that many gave me in the field of education. ”He called for the money to be allocated to fund scholarships and schools in the village.
Major contributions will also be made to three foundations that support health workers, children with leukemia and animal rights, according to a city council press release.
According to the town hall website, Le Chambon and nearby villages housed Jewish refugees, mostly children. Barack Obama mentioned the people in his statements at the Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony in April 2009 and Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, awarded the commune the title of Righteous in 1990.
Schwam’s father was a doctor and his mother helped establish a library in the Rivesaltes camp, one of many created by the Vichy regime to imprison Jews. Thousands were transported from there to Auschwitz, according to the Jewish Virtual Library.
Friedel Reiter, a young Swiss social worker who volunteered to help refugees at the time, recorded family information and was likely to help them move to Le Chambon when the Rivesaltes camp was closed in 1942. say the town hall.
When he was only twelve, Schwam was employed by Secours Suisse, a subsector of the Swiss Red Cross specializing in helping children during the war, where his mother also worked. Schwam enrolled in a pharmacy course at the University of León in 1950 and graduated in 1957.
The city council does not know if he returned regularly to Le Chambon and asks for more information about “the little Viennese Jew” who was so generous more than 75 years later.
“We didn’t know Mr. Schwam, now we’re trying to establish who he was and what happened to him here,” Vallat said.
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