An oath to protect.
- Mar 1
- 1 min read
It was July 15, 1942, a hot day during a hot week in Paris. Theo Larue found out that a roundup of Jews was scheduled for the next day. He immediately alerted the eight Jewish families in his building and set to work getting false papers for his neighbors, the Lictensztajns. Theo’s information was correct.
The following day, the French police, on orders of the Nazi occupiers, rounded up 7,000 Jews, 4,000 of whom were children, and held them in an indoor bicycle stadium, the Vélodrome d’Hiver. They were held for five days in the searingly hot stadium with no food, no water, no sanitation and then shipped to various internment camps.
The Lictensztajns, however, were not among those in the Vel d’Hiv or on one of those trains because Theo had successfully secreted them away to the south of France with his false papers.
What makes this story remarkable lies in one small detail – Theo Larue wasn’t a shopkeeper, or a clerk, or an artist. He was a Parisian policeman, one of the very men entrusted with rounding up the Jews. Why did he do it? Why did he risk his own life and his family’s? Well, simply put, he had taken an oath, and that oath charged him with protecting ALL citizens, so he did.
Theophile Larue and his wife, Madeleine, were recognized as Righteous Among the Nations in 2007.
