Your Son Charlot (Broché)

The 16th July 1942, an eight year old boy, his two month old sister and their mother narrowly escape from the roundup of Vel d'Hiv in Paris. There then follows a mad stampede to escape from the Nazi hydra. By the intermediary of a resistance network, Charles is sent to Passais-la-Conception, a small village in the remote Normandy countryside. There he is taken in by the Richards, a couple of picturesque villagers, who are already hiding several other Jewish children.
Madeleine, their 24 year old daughter, proves to be a true hearted resistant, in love with a Jewish resistant. She becomes Charles' substitute mother and "guardian angel" during these strange holidays. In Passais, this village where silence is the rule, Charles lives an almost happy parenthesis. Far from the storms of the war. Discovering the joys of nature under the guidance of Granddad Richard and his friends, Charles forgets his worries about the absence of news from his family...
It is only upon his return to Paris, in September 1944, that he discovers the reality of the war through two different diametrically opposed accounts, from his uncles : one a prisoner in Germany, the other a survivor of the death camps. And the wait for his father to return... Charles Zajde gives us an exceptional witness account about those we call the "Justes". These ordinary heroes who, thinking only of doing their duty, saved in all discretion, thousands of Jews in France.
And in doing this they saved France's honor. These "Justes" who received the solemn homage of the Nation on the 18th January 2007, under the initiative of Jacques Chirac and Simone Veil. The strength of this witness account lies in the fast that it was written precisely with the aim of paying homage to the "Justes", through this exemplary family of the Richards. Their name now figures on the memorial of Yad Vachem in Jerusalem.
Charles shares with us, in an overwhelming way, all the emotions and sensations, intact, of the child he was. Victim of a war he didn't understand. In this sense, this book is a magnificent lesson of hope and of resilience for the use of the future generations. Didn't the fragile little boy, who refused to fight in the school playground, go on to become a great scientific researcher doubled with a great entrepreneur ? Charles Zajde is in fact the inventor of the tomography in nuclear medicine (medical imagery in 3D), which he exported throughout the whole world, for the goodness of humanity...