sunchild327’s Reviews > Through the Morgue Door: One Woman’s Story of Survival and Saving Children in German-Occupied Paris > Status Update

But the war had not finished with me. Just when I thought it was all over, I learned that I had been enlisted in the fighting French Forces for the duration of the war. I didn’t have a choice.


* All excerpts are from an uncorrected proof and are subject to change.

Surely he couldn’t believe any more than we did about some type of work in the East. He knew that no one ever heard from detainees once they had been deported. He knew that some prisoners preferred to take their own lives rather than be put on the trains. He knew.

And then I thought about the mothers in the maternity ward at Rothschild, those mothers who agreed to give up their babies so that they, too, would have a chance to survive. What had we done to deserve this?

One day in July, I was indignant to learn that we no longer could do our shopping at the same hours as everyone else. We were restricted to one hour, between three and four in the afternoon. This news seemed so unbelievably cruel that it took me an entire day to be convinced it was true. Yet this was really what the government had imposed on us. There was no end to the baseness, the cruelty.

The examination for the externat is not open to Jews.

A shock swept over me, red hot; I fought hard not to cry. Surely this was a dream, or rather a nightmare. I read it again, as students entering the office to register jostled me because I was in their way, standing in the middle of the corridor, frozen. I wasn’t one of them.

With all the experience of a fourteen-year-old, I, a child normally so discreet , so obedient, so ordinary, announced that I was going to be a doctor. I can still see the baffled look on my mother’s face.
“You mean you want to work in a hospital? As a nurse?”
“No, not as a nurse. As a pediatrician.”

I can still see the baffled look on my mother’s face.
“You mean you want to work in a hospital? As a nurse?”
“No, not as a nurse. As a pediatrician.”
- Collette, age 14

And then she leaned over as if to share a secret, “You have to remember . . . The morgue was over there, and then when you walked down the rue Santerre, there was a small door, and that was the small morgue door that opened when I’d leave with the children.That’s how it was.”
- Colette Brull-Ulmann (1920-2021)

"One can only wonder why such excellent care was provided to people who were then returned to Drancy, loaded on trains, and deported “to the East,” to the fate that the world now knows so well but was barely guessed at then."

Such powerful thoughts.

"Colette Brull-Ulmann (1920–2021) was a French Resistance fighter who was a medical intern at the Rothschild Hospital in Paris during World War II.
Brull-Ulmann enjoyed a remarkably long life; she died in 2021 at 101 years old."

I can only imagine the stories she has to tell. I truly look forward to reading about her impactful life.