Resistance fighter Colette Brull-Ulmann is dead
Colette Brull-Ulmann, who died on May 22, in Bry-sur-Marne (Val-de-Marne), at the age of 101
During the Occupation, she participated
in the rescue of Jewish children from the Rothschild Hospital in Paris.
But the faces of the fifteen children that she had not been able to
tear away from deportation, like little Danielle and her sister Céline,
obscured the memory of the dozens of miraculous who owed her to have
survived. “I wanted to forget what I had seen”, she justified herself.
It was not until the decline of her life
that, an old lady in the eyes of a child, her body leaning on a cane but
agile, leaping speech, she finally delivered herself to Jean-Christophe
Portes in a documentary broadcast in 2015 (Jewish children rescued from Rothschild hospital, with Rémi Bénichou) then in a book published in 2017 (Children of the Last Salvation,
City Edition). If she had decided late to tell this episode, she said,
it was less to glorify herself than to honor the memory of those who
had worked with her and had eclipsed themselves with their secret
In 1940, Colette Brull was 20 years old and was a medical student in
Paris. The first anti-Semitic laws prevent her from continuing her studies: the profession is now forbidden to Jews. There is an
exception, the Rothschild Hospital, in the 12e arrondissement,
which was still a private institution at that time. Colette became an
intern there at the end of 1941 and soon had to, like part of the
establishment’s staff, sew a yellow star on her white coat.
