Voiron

In the night of March 23-24, 1944, the Gestapo and the milice arrived around 3am at the La Martellière House, where children were staying. They took the eighteen people present to Gestapo headquarters in Grenoble. All of them were deported to Drancy on March 27. The twelve smallest ones and the cook Marie Bugajski, were taken by convoy 71 to Auschwitz on April 13. The other young people were sent in convoy 73 to Kaunas, Lithuania, and Reval, Estonia, on May 15, 1944. Erwin Uhr, Karl's older brother, aged 15 at the time, was the only escapee. Rabbi Schneour Zalman Schneersohn, who had taken the children in, who, with two others was on the way to the house, was warned of the round-up just in time and was able to hide. One of the young men, 20-year-old Marcel Gryc, managed to escape from Drancy on April 26, and was thus not deported to the camps.

This tragic event was rediscovered in 1996 by a Grenoble student, Delphine Deroo. On September 14, 1997, a plaque in memory of the victims was put up on a wall in the La Marteillières agriculture high school, near where the now-demolished building where the round-up took place once stood. Erwin Urh attended the ceremony organized by the town of Voiron, Grenoble B'nai Brith and Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem. The plaque reads: "In memory of the 16 Jewish children and one Jewish adult, the victims of Nazi barbarity, arrested at La Martellières on March 23, 1944, and taken to the death camps. Let us never forget.

BELK Simon, aged 12, BUGAJSKI Abraham, 19, BUAGJSKI Isodore, 15, ECKMANN Gérard, 14, IZBICKI Théodore, 13, KOUZKA Maurice, 14, ORLOWSKI Léonard, 22, RONSENZWEIG Abraham, 20, ROWINSKY Bernard, 20, ROWINSKY Simon, 14, ROWINSKY Jacques, 7, SAVELSKI Emmanuel, 18, SPINDEL Martin, 13, SPITZ Samuel, 8, UHR Karl, 9, BUGAJSKI Marie, 46".

Source: N. Papon, « En mémoire des enfants de la Martellières » in Le Voironnais, le magazine d’information de la ville de Voiron, n°46, septembre 1997, pp. 5-7.