Sabine Zlatin

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PAX (1954)

Sabine Zlatin (January 13, 1907 - September 21, 1996) was a Polish-born French woman who hid Jewish children during the World War II.

Zlatin was born Sabine Chwast in a Jewish family in Warsaw. As a young woman she moved to France, where she married Miron Zlatin. With him she ran a poultry farm in Landas in the north of France. Both received French citizenship in 1939.

After the outbreak of World War II, Sabine Zlatin begun to train with the Red Cross. When Germans advanced to France, Zlatins moved to Montpelier, where Sabine Zlatin was posted to a military hospital. After the formation of Vichy France government in 1941, she was forced to leave.

At the Herault prefecture in the French-occupied zone, she contacted Jewish children aid association OSE. She helped to have released children that had been interned in the camps of Agde and Rivesaltes.

When the Germans occupied the rest of the France in 1943, Zlatin took 17 children with her to Italian occupation zone. Via the recommendation of sub-prefect of Belley they received permission to use a house in Izieu and founded the Herault refugee children's home La Maison d'Izieu ("Children's Home of Izieu) where Jewish children hid.

However, on April 6, 1944, the Lyon Gestapo, led by Klaus Barbie, raided the house and took away all forty-four of the children and the seven adults who took care of them. Zlatin herself was elsewhere at the time. Forty-two of the children and five of the adults were gassed at the Auschwitz concentration camp, while two of the teenage children and the home superintendent, Miron Zlatin, were executed by firing squad at Reval in Estonia.

In 1987 Zlatin testified against Barbie in his war crimes trial. The same year she founded an association to create a museum for the Izieu victims. She received support from various sources, including from French president François Mitterrand. The museum opened April 4, 1994, in the very house that she had used. The Museum is located 60 miles from Lyon in the Rhône Valley.