In Nazi-occupied French Alps, a doctor risked death to save a Jewish girl. Why didn’t others?
Newly published ‘Two Sisters’ is a family memoir that goes back and forth in time to examine motivations for resistance and questions of morality in Vichy France
Renee Ghert-Zand is the health reporter and a feature writer for The Times of Israel.
Shortly before Christmas 1943, 15-year-old Huguette Müller slipped and broke her leg in the tiny, remote Alpine village of Val d’Isère, France. A young doctor named Frédéric Pétri was called to treat Huguette. He examined the leg and told her and her older sister Marion that the injury was so bad that Huguette would have to be taken to the hospital down in the valley.
Panicked, Marion punched Pétri in the face.
The doctor acted cooly, realizing that the aggressive response was because the girls were Jewish and hiding from the Germans, who had recently begun to occupy the area. Without deliberation, Pétri offered to take Huguette into the home he shared with his mother and sister and care for her during the six months it would take for her leg to heal fully.
He urged Marion to leave the village in the meantime for her safety, a very real threat as their mother, Edith, had been deported to Auschwitz from the French Riviera.
The question of why Pétri risked his and his family’s lives to save the sisters drives a new book by British journalist and author Rosie Whitehouse. “Two Sisters: Betrayal, Love, and Resistance in Wartime France” was published on January 28, 2025.
“What makes somebody like Dr. Pétri exceptional? He shouldn’t be exceptional… What’s shocking is that everybody should have been doing the same thing. These are really important moral questions,” Whitehouse told The Times of Israel in an interview from her home in London.
“I don’t want this book to be something that’s ‘just’ a Holocaust book of Jewish interest. These are actually moral questions about everybody who lived in Europe, moral questions about everybody [today],” she said.
In the process of helping the now-nonagenarian Huguette gather sufficient proof to nominate Pétri to be named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, Whitehouse (who is married to one of Marion’s sons) conducted archival research and on-the-ground reporting that resulted in the multifaceted “Two Sisters.”
The book is at once a family memoir, a story of cooperation between the French and Jewish Resistance, a history of the Vichy government’s mixed record in collaboration with the Nazis, and an examination of the wartime fissures in French society that have lasted until today.
Marion and Hugette’s parents Edith Wertheim and Johannes Müller were upper-middle-class German Jews. The sisters, seven years apart in age, grew up assimilated in Berlin until they fled Germany when the Wertheim family’s successful textile business was Aryanized in 1933. The Müllers started over in Paris, with Johannes having the family baptized and forbidding them from revealing their Jewish backgrounds. Marion was sent to a boarding school, and when she finished, she joined her father in his work in the film industry. The younger sister, originally named Inge Margot, assumed the name Huguette to better fit in among her classmates.
As the parent’s marriage fell apart and Johannes chose to live with his mistress under false identities in Paris, Edith tried to find safety with Huguette among the many other refugees on the Riviera. Marion lived independently in Lyon and joined the Jewish Resistance, where she met her first husband, Peter Haymann, a Parisian Jew.
Haymann escaped imprisonment in Lyon and fled on foot over the Pyrenees into Spain in the winter of 1942. He trained in sabotage and partisan warfare in the UK. He parachuted back into France with Bernard Schlumberger, a Protestant from Alsace, who was to be the Free French army’s envoy in the Toulouse region of south-west France. The two men were tasked with uniting the scattered local Resistance militias behind Free French leader General Charles de Gaulle from a base in the tiny town of Vabre. The Protestant town welcomed Jews seeking refuge, and its residents did what they could to protect them.
Whitehouse discovered that Marion, who assumed the false identity of Juliette Giraud, initially worked for the Resistance as a courier and later helped her husband and his associates in sabotage operations.
“We knew the kernel of the story, a rough outline of what had happened, but we never knew all the details so that we couldn’t answer 100 percent of all our questions. That was much of my motivation for going forward [with this book]. I thought, wait a minute — I [as a Holocaust researcher] spend all this time finding out what happened to other people’s families, and I hadn’t done it for my own family,” Whitehouse said.
According to Whitehouse, her husband, journalist Tim Judah, had tried to ask Huguette questions about the war but was careful not to push too hard about the sensitive matter. Huguette gave her testimony to a Holocaust education institution, but Marion, who died in 2010 in London, never told her whole story.
“It’s not exactly that my mother-in-law didn’t say anything. She dropped these little hints, some of which I knew didn’t fit historically, making it even more intriguing,” Whitehouse said.
After Marion died, Whitehouse and one of her daughters were tasked with closing up her flat. They found Marion’s fake identity card and a box of photographs. Whitehouse knew her mother-in-law was not sentimental and would not have hesitated to destroy the material if she hadn’t wanted somebody to find it.
“I instinctively knew that she had left these for some reason. She didn’t want it destroyed. She wanted it passed on,” Whitehouse said. “I was surprised to find out what Granny Marion had been up to and how brave her first husband was. It made me very proud.”
According to the author, it is essential to share accessible accounts of World War II and Holocaust history in different countries. Having recently written a book on Holocaust sites, memorials and museums in Europe, Whitehouse emphasized that the Holocaust unfolded differently in different countries. Although atrocities against Jews happened in France, the Holocaust narrative there is not identical to the nearly universally familiar one of the ghettos and death camps in Eastern Europe.
“Much of it had to do with the nature of the warfare on the ground. There was no total war on French soil. The total war happened very briefly in 1940 and then in 1944. For the rest of the time, most people were living quite happily. There were difficulties, but there was food. It was not Warsaw in 1942, where someone would be shot if they were found hiding Jews. It was a radically different situation where people were left with more choices about how they reacted, and that’s where this moral question [at the core of this book] comes in,” Whitehouse said.
She is convinced that had more people acted like Dr. Pétri and his associates in the Resistance, considerably fewer than 74,150 Jews would have been deported from France.
“At Drancy [transit camp], people could have done something to stop the deportation trains. If [the local residents] had all stormed the train, it would have stopped instantly. We know that because things like that happened right across France. The moment something went like this, the Germans pulled back. With fewer men on the ground in France than in other places, they were much more skittish,” Whitehouse said.
Whitehouse shared that one of the most satisfying aspects of writing “Two Sisters” was seeing how much Dr. Pétri’s being named in 2022 as one of France’s 4,000 Righteous Among the Nations meant not only to his family but also to others in Val d’Isère. Bringing the doctor’s story to light led locals to tell the author that they remembered that other Jews had been hidden in the village that has become a luxury ski vacation destination. Indeed, some of the descendants of those Jews still live there.
“Everyone came out of the woodwork. It was extraordinary to see that. And it completely changed my perspective on the place,” Whitehouse said.
