Survivor: Eva Perlman

The alert came at dusk. Eva Perlman (then called Eva Hanna Gutmann), just 12 years old, looked out the window of the apartment her family was renting in Autrans, France, on the second story of what they called “the yellow house.” Not far away, she could make out the silhouettes of German soldiers descending a mountain slope. Eva, her mother and Eva’s two younger brothers — all of whom had blond hair, blue eyes and false papers belying their German-Jewish roots — stayed indoors. Eva’s father, Rodolphe, who appeared more Semitic, had left several weeks earlier to join the French resistance. It was August 1944.

A day or two later, a Nazi officer and his assistant came to the yellow house. “You know a few crumbs of German; perhaps you can help me,” the Gutmanns’ landlord, who lived in the first-floor apartment, shouted upstairs to Eva’s mother, Charlotte. Eva remained with her brothers while Charlotte translated, somehow managing to speak in feigned broken German with a French accent. The Nazis were demanding a bedroom, and the landlord requested that Charlotte vacate her room and move to the attic.

For the next two weeks, with the Nazis living in the Gutmanns’ apartment, Charlotte didn’t sleep. Instead she kept watch at an attic window in case Rodolphe, from whom they’d had no communication, were to return under cover of night and throw pebbles at her window to wake her. 

Eva never spoke to the Nazis, and she recalled that her mother acted fairly normal. “I must have been scared, but we just lived,” she said.

Eva was born in Berlin on May 18, 1932. By the following January, Hitler was named chancellor of Germany, and, soon after, Rodolphe was forbidden to work as a patent attorney and Charlotte, a medical student, was expelled from her university. 

Sometime around November 1933, Rodolphe got an offer to join a French law firm, so he moved the family to Courbevoie, a suburb of Paris. Eva’s brother Ernest was born there in May 1935.

Needing more space, the family moved in 1938 to a villa in Le Vésinet, another Paris suburb, where Eva’s paternal grandparents joined them from Berlin. A second brother, Raymond, was born in April 1939. 

But after German troops attacked Western Europe in May 1940 and headed toward Paris, Rodolphe was asked to take some of the law firm’s files and open an office in Massay, a village about 140 miles south. Eva and Ernest accompanied him, with the rest of the family planning to follow. 

In Massay, Rodolphe rented a small castle, which would serve as their home and his offices. He also hired a woman to take care of Eva and Ernest during the day. 

When Eva was 8, she was rushed to the hospital with acute appendicitis. Later, recovering from the surgery in a large ward filled mostly with wounded soldiers, she watched as a young soldier next to her suddenly began vomiting blood. He died soon after. “To this day I remember it very vividly,” she said.

Air-raid sirens occasionally blared in Massay, and the family took refuge in the castle’s basement. One day, after an alert ended, they came upstairs to find that a piece of shrapnel from an exploded bomb had pierced the roof above Rodolphe’s office and landed on his chair. “If he had stayed at his desk, he would have been killed,” Eva recalled. 

Less than a year later, in 1941, as life in Massay became increasingly dangerous, the family moved to an apartment in Caluire, a suburb of Lyon, where Eva’s mother, younger brother and grandmother joined them. Eva’s grandfather had died of pneumonia in Le Vésinet, and not long after, her grandmother died of natural causes in Caluire. “It was a miracle that she passed away then, because she would have made my parents’ lives extremely hard,” Eva said.

But the Nazis kept advancing, and Lyon, too, became unsafe. Sometime in fall 1942, Charlotte traveled to the mountains above Grenoble to look for a children’s home, a pension d’enfants, where French families placed their children for schooling or during vacations. All were full. Finally, quite desperate, she found Clairefontaine, a Catholic residential school run by Georgette and Joseph Menthonnex in the village of Autrans, just north of Grenoble.

At Clairefontaine, which housed about 20 children as well as the Menthonnexes’ own children, Eva dug up carrots and also went for long walks. Although she was just 10, she understood that the Nazis were after the Jews and they had to hide. “I knew the circumstances were dire, and I made the best of it,” she said. (In 1996, Georgette and Joseph Menthonnex were recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.)

During one of Charlotte’s visits to the school, in late 1942 or early 1943, she received a message from Rodolphe to remain in Autrans. “I am coming,” he said. It was there that they rented the second-floor apartment of the yellow house.  

Eva attended high school in Autrans and Rodolphe continued to work, doing everything by hand. Once a week, he took the bus to Grenoble, where his secretary from Lyon met him, and he exchanged his completed work for new assignments.

On July 14, 1944, Eva’s family was picnicking atop a mountain when planes flew overhead. “It must be the Americans,” Rodolphe said. But as bombs began falling on Autrans, they quickly realized these were German aircrafts. At that moment, Rodolphe resolved to enlist in the French resistance. “If I am to die, I want to die with a weapon in my hand,” he said. 

By August, Grenoble had been liberated and the resistance fighters had been sent home, though German soldiers still roamed the area and fighting sporadically erupted. On Aug. 30, Charlotte received word that Rodolphe and a friend were fine, but needed civilian clothes and money and asked Charlotte to meet them. 

Charlotte took the children back to Clairefontaine and set out by bicycle with the friend’s daughter to meet the men. But the brakes on her bicycle failed and she crashed, likely preventing her, she later learned, from pedaling directly into German hands. She eventually reunited with Rodolphe and they picked up the children at Clairefontaine on Sept. 4. 

Around October 1944, the family returned to their apartment in Caluire, the suburb of Lyon, which had been liberated on Sept. 3. “For me, the war was over,” Eva said. During the next few years, they moved to various cities, finally returning to Le Vésinet, where Eva graduated high school in 1950. 

After the war, as a Jew born in Germany, Eva felt like a second-class citizen and had stopped speaking German. During 1950-51, however, she lived in Israel, where, she said, “I felt free.” 

Eva later attended nursing school in Paris, graduating in October 1955. Soon after, she began working as the assistant director of a Jewish day nursery in Paris. 

On June 23, 1956, a mutual friend arranged for Eva to meet Mel Perlman, an American from Kansas City, Mo., who had been studying at Hebrew University. “I opened the door, and there was an immediate bond,” Eva recalled. Less than six weeks later, on July 30, they were married in a civil ceremony, and again on Sept. 30 in a Jewish ceremony in Kansas City. 

Eva and Mel settled in Oxford, England, where he studied social anthropology and where their daughter Ilana was born in August 1957. His work took them to western Uganda, where their second daughter, Tamar, was born in February 1961, followed by son David in January 1962. 

From 1963 to 1970, they lived in Berkeley, where Mel was a professor at UC Berkeley, and then moved to St. Catharines, Ontario, where he taught at Brock University and where Eva became an accountant. But in 1988, Mel died of leukemia, and Eva moved to Los Angeles to be close to Ilana. Eva continued working as an accountant, retiring in 1997.

Now 82 and a grandmother of six, Eva works selling coffee and tea and writing her life story. Since 2011, she has accompanied the Los Angeles delegation of students on the annual March of the Living trip. 

Eva remains astounded by the many ways in which she and her family were protected. “It’s unbelievable,” she said. “My life is full of miracles.”