Prior to the mission, extensive arrests had been made of Jewish families from the north of France and the Lille area (close to the border with Belgium) with the aim of transferring them to the concentration and extermination camps through the Malines transit camp. On 11 September, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, a group of Jews were arrested and brought to the Fives-Lille train station.
Among the Jews brought to the station were members of the Stulzaft family – father Berick and his wife Helene, who sold fare at traveling markets and lived in Lille with their children Jean, aged 22 months, and six-month old Oscar. They were loaded onto a train that was about to leave for Malines.
Hoffman managed to mislead the guards by presenting them with his ID card of supposedly German origin.
With the help of his friends, he first smuggled the two Stulzaft children off the train, followed by Helene and another Jew, a Mr. Koenigsman. The family members were initially hidden in the Hoffman family home. (According to existing knowledge, Berick also survived the Holocaust.)
When the Hoffman family home was bombed, baby Oscar was injured. Hoffman brought him to the local hospital, where he underwent several surgeries. During a visit by the boy's mother, it turned out that the nurse at the hospital was about to call the Gestapo to inform them of the Jewish child. With determined resourcefulness, Hoffman immediately took the boy and his mother to a different hiding place, thus saving the Jewish family again.
Later, the family was hidden with friends close to the train station in Tourcoing, near the border with Belgium. Oscar was given a fictitious identity as Jacques Morel. In February 1944, the family moved to another hiding place in Lille, where they stayed until liberation in September 1944. Additionally, in 1946, Marcel Hoffman traveled to Germany from where he brought back more family members, Sonia Brett and her daughter, who had survived the extermination camps. The friendship between the families continued after the war.
"Paying heed to my patriotism and humanitarianism, I snuck into the group and, regardless of the danger, I used cunning methods to help save some 40 children and adults from the deportation,"
Marcel Hoffman said in his testimony, which is housed in the Righteous Among the Nations archive at Yad Vashem. "The devoted members of the underground gathered these people together, and hosted them for the duration of the German occupation."
Recently, close to 80 years after these events, Yad Vashem recognized Mersen Hoffman as Righteous Among the Nations. "This story presents a unique rescue case in which certain workers of a railway company, which was actively involved in transferring Jews from their places of residence to the extermination camps, chose not to cooperate and instead to carry out a daring rescue operation," says Dr. Joel Zisenwein, Director of the Righteous Among the Nations Department at Yad Vashem. "Marcel Hoffman displayed a rare courage and concern among the company's employees – and therefore deserves praise and recognition from the Jewish people".
This article originally appeared in the "Yad Vashem Jerusalem Magazine," volume 97.
