A reunion of the rescued

Woburn youth reconnects 2 who fled the Holocaust as boys

A young George Price with Louise Cartier, matriarch of the Catholic family that hid him, his mother, and 15 other Jews from the Nazis in Château-du-Loir, southwest of Paris, beginning in 1942. The Cartiers are among those honored at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, at Price's request. He settled in the United States after the war and lives in Fairfax, Va. (Courtesy of George Price)

He was 6 years old that early morning when he was awakened by a sudden commotion. His uncle had bolted the door. His mother had dressed him frantically and hoisted him through an upstairs window, dropping him to the hillside below. Run, she had called after him, run to the neighbor's house.

That was the last time Henri Joinovici saw his mother. It was the last time he saw his brother and sister. The French police, acting on Nazi orders, came for every Jew in Château-du-Loir, a small railway town southwest of Paris.

All he knew in the shadows of that morning on the scrub-covered hill was to do as his mother instructed. He ran, feet flying through the dark, a mile and a half, to a stone farmhouse. There, he met George Price, a 3-year-old boy who had fled the Nazis with his ailing father and mother. "I remember there was a little boy there," Joinovici said.

Against all odds, both boys would survive the horrors of the coming years. But it would be 66 years before Joinovici and Price saw each other again.

They did on Sunday, reunited in the Woburn living room of a Jewish boy who discovered their history while researching the Holocaust for his bar mitzvah.

Price, a 69-year-old aerospace engineer, came from Fairfax, Va., where he eventually settled after coming to the United States after the war. Joinovici, a 72-year-old retired tailor, came from Paris, where he settled after the war. At about 11 a.m., they greeted each other at last.

They hugged and exchanged kisses on the cheek. Both looked a little stunned. They spent three hours together, studying old black-and-white photographs and trying to answer a lifetime of questions about the events of October 1942 that changed their lives.

"It's a very incredible story, all of this," Joinovici said in French, wrapping an arm around Price.

Seated around a glass table in a quiet study, they began to unwind the past. Joinovici, who talks to school groups in France about the war, spoke easily about his memories of Edouard and Louise Cartier, the Catholic family who lived in the farmhouse and who hid him and Price, along with 15 other Jews.

"That period is really important in my life," Joinovici said. By preserving the past, he said, "my brother and sister - and their ashes - are not forgotten."

Price listened quietly at first, bouncing his knee as he looked over photos of Joinovici's mother, Berthe; father, Mars; 11-year-old brother Albert, and 12-year-old sister Anna, all of whom were killed at Auschwitz.

"People have different ways of dealing with these things," Price said. "Henri's way is to memorialize all this, and I really honor all that. But I don't even go watch World War II movies or anything. It's just too emotionally draining, I guess. It took many, many years before I could even go to the Holocaust Museum" in nearby Washington.

During the war, more than 77,000 Jews were deported from France and murdered in Nazi camps. The victims included more than 8,000 children under age 13.

Price and Joinovici were reunited by Nathaniel Jean, a 13-year-old from Woburn, who wanted to honor a child victim of the Holocaust at his bar mitvzah last Saturday. Searching on an Internet database of Holocaust victims this summer, Nathaniel learned "by chance" about Albert Joinovici and his surviving brother, Henri, he said. Nathaniel called Joinovici, explained his plans, and Joinovici said he would come to the bar mitzvah. He also told Nathaniel about Price, whom he had not heard from but believed was living in the United States. The Jean family located Price in Virginia and invited him to come to Massachusetts.

"It was a great sense of pride and accomplishment to know what I've done," Nathaniel said.

Recounting their ordeals, the men credited their survival to the Cartier family.

"They had no reason to risk their lives and they just did it because it was the right thing, and that is just amazing," Price said.

Price and Joinovici had grown up in the same neighborhood in Paris. In the summer of 1942, when the Nazis began deporting Parisian Jews, their families fled to Château-du-Loir, 150 miles away.

Price and his parents hid with the Cartiers. Joinovici lived in a house owned by an anarchist who was sheltering rebels from the Spanish Civil War. On Oct. 12, 1942, at 5:30 a.m., the police began to arrest the town's Jews. Joinovici said they came to his house first.

After racing to the farmhouse, Joinovici hid behind a well. Then he was taken inside by the Cartiers, who were planning a wedding for the next day. They told Joinovici to pretend he was the son of a niece whose husband had been taken as a prisoner of war.

Joinovici and Price spent two weeks together in the farmhouse, before the Cartiers sent Joinovici to a friend's house in Tours, 36 miles away. Price said that because he was 3, he has no memories of Joinovici.

Price recalled that his mother, Irma, who was German, told him not to speak in German, lest he arouse suspicion. He recalled her using fake papers to work at the local railway station, where he said she passed information to Nazi resisters. He remembered finding what looked like tinsel behind the farmhouse, and learning years later that it was chaff from a British warplane.

The memories only hint at dangers that a 3-year-old boy could never fully comprehend. "You say, 'Were you scared? Did you have hardship?' Only in retrospect," Price said. "If you grow up in a cave, that's normal, right?"

Joinovici recalled running into the woods behind the farmhouse when someone would spot police nearby. He recalled the difficulty the family had finding food because of shortages caused by the Nazi occupation. And he remembered burying Price's father, Moszek, in the backyard after he died of an illness.

By the time the Allies landed in Normandy in 1944, nine of Joinovici's kin had been killed by the Nazis. Price lost his grandmother, who lived in Germany.

Joinovici returned to Paris. He had three children and two grandchildren.

Price moved to the United States with his mother, joined the Air Force, became an aerospace engineer, and had two sons and a granddaughter. One son he named Edward, for Cartier.

Joinovici and Price each kept in touch with the Cartiers, who died in the 1970s.

Price keeps a photo of the couple on his bureau and successfully petitioned to include them among a list of the righteous at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

"There were French collaborators and there were bad French," Price said. "But there were also people like the Cartiers. They set quite an example for the world."

Michael Levenson can be reached at mlevenson@globe.com