SEGMENT ONE    

: NELEE LANGMUIR’S STORY AS FROM THE VIDEO    

Introduction. Before Nelee Langmuir’s death in Summer, 2010, her daughter wrote of her mother’s experience as a Hidden Child. She wrote of it 2005, September 3 and Debra Wanner in so doing added her voice as a new generation to her mother’s story. Here she serves as an introduction to the condensed narrative that follows of Nelee’s oral history that tells of her remembrance of that time in her childhood, and that of her sister’s, when through the help of good people in France, she and her sister escaped from the German Nazi occupiers who would have otherwise sent them to a death camp from France.    

Nelee’s complete video narrative is comprised as an interview this writer viewed at the Holocaust Center of Northern California, San Francisco as set up for the screen by their archivist Judith Janec. The more than three hour “monologue” of memory is an interview punctuated with thoughtful questions by Peter Ryan and Elizabeth Ryan. Nelee’s face is seen throughout the remembrance; voices of the interviewers come to audio only from time to time. Nelee is moved deeply in a visible sense from time to time throughout the talk of her own Hidden Child experience, and it shows that she is a woman of strength and intelligence, as she apparently was, too, as a child–As her sister must have been too– And in addition, as her parents were, as they, too, were flexible and resourceful human beings.    

» Read more: Obituary: Nelee Langmuir’s escape from Nazis as Hidden Child