She never sought to praise her bravery. Yet it is a great lady from Nogent who has just passed away, at the age of 101. The resistant Colette Brull-Ulmann, who had saved many Jewish children, at the Rothschild hospital in Paris, died in Bry-sur-Marne on May 22.
Despite the tributes they deserved, Colette Brull-Ulmann was slow to testify. She retained more the list of the few children that she had not been able to save from deportation than the much longer list of the little ones who were saved thanks to the risks she took within the “network of the Rothschild hospital” .
In 2018, she finally agreed to participate in a film dedicated to these caregivers who saved hundreds of Jewish children from the horrors of the camps. Then Colette Brull-Ulmann testified in the moving book “The Children of the Last Salvation”, * co-written with the journalist and novelist Jean-Christophe Portes.
At 97, then taking refuge in the calm of her apartment in Nogent, she confided to the Parisian “It was only after the liberation that we spoke of a network. I am Claire Heymann, a social worker, who one day came to see me and asked me if I wanted to have children ”.
” A great lady “
In 1942, Colette was a medical student and entered the Rothschild hospital as an intern, the only one where Jews still had the right to practice. After the Vel-d’Hiv’in raid in July, it will become a half-free hospital, half concentration camp. “It was from that moment, when we learned of the indescribable horror of the fate reserved for them, that we tried to keep the children.” Colette has never sought to find the children she saved. Later, she will be enlisted by her father, a 14-year-old hero who returned from Drancy and had already joined the resistance. The then 22-year-old young woman actually belonged to the BCRA (central intelligence and action office), the espionage service created by de Gaulle.
La Resistante, with bright eyes and an ever-lively tone, moved to Nogent in 1985, after having pursued her career as a pediatrician in Seine-Saint-Denis. “She is a great lady,” greets Jacques JP Martin, LR mayor of Nogent. “A personality both endearing and particularly influential culturally in the city, remembers the one who had met him on numerous occasions. I have always appreciated her for her lucidity and her desire not to fall into the throes of old age. She was one of the important personalities of the Marne valley. “
* “The Children of the Last Salvation”, by Colette Brull-Ullmann with Jean-Christophe Portes. City Editions.
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