Nicole Denier Long papers

Nicole Jeanne Celina Denier (1921-2013) was born in Paris to Pierre Celestin Louis Denier (b. 1891, Paris) and Eve Marcelle Molina (b. 1893, Marseille). Marcelle was descended from a well-known Jewish family who came to Avignon in the 11th century from Portugal and Spain under the Pope’s protection and settled in the village of Crémieux. Pierre, who was Catholic, met Marcelle during WWI, when she was working as a nurse. Their son Michel was born in 1919, and Nicole was born in 1921. When Nicole was only three months old, Pierre deserted the family and went to Argentina to work as a scientist. Though Nicole never heard from her father again, her paternal grandparents helped Marcelle and the children even during the war. Marcelle was also aided by her cousin Lily Cicurel, who was married to the French politician Pierre Mendes-France. Nicole’s family was completely secular, and her paternal grandparents who had been raised Christian, but were non-believers. Nicole only learned that her mother was Jewish in 1941, when the Nazis began registering Jews. A few days before the German occupation, Marcelle asked Nicole to evacuate south for safety. Nicole stayed in Limoges for a month or two before returning to Paris to be with her mother. Nicole was studying ancient Greek at her high school on a scholarship, and her brother was studying medicine. When she was 21, Nicole went to study at the École Normale Supérieure. The chaplain there understood how dangerous it was to be Jewish at that time, and he obtained a baptismal certificate for Nicole that later saved both her and her mother’s lives. By 1942, Marcelle was required to register as a Jew and wear a yellow star. Nicole’s brother married a Catholic woman, was not under suspicion of being Jewish, and checked in daily with his sister and mother to make sure they were OK. Marcelle lost her job in the government, began working for U.G.I.F. (Union Générale Des Israélites de France/Union of French Jews), and was able to learn the dates of impending deportations. Nicole became involved with members of the resistance at the Sorbonne. Using the pseudonym Michelle, she carried arms in a bag from one subway to another to transfer them to other resistance members. Nicole moved out of her mother’s house in 1942 to the Boulevard St-Michel, as her resistance activities endangered her mother, who, as a registered Jew, was already in a precarious situation. After Nicole finished school, she tutored students and worked for the U.G.I.F. smuggling Jewish children out of Paris to Nice to be brought to safety in Italian territory. Nicole once slept at her mother’s house, and the two women were arrested by French policemen. Luckily, Nicole’s mother had Nicole’s baptism certificate in the house, and they were released. Afterwards, Nicole and her mother no longer felt safe in the apartment and moved to Passy in the 16th arrondissement in Paris. There they hid people who were in danger of being deported. The apartment became a temporary refuge until those hidden found a more permanent hiding place. Nicole and her mother continued to shelter others from 1943-1944, when the Americans liberated France. In 1945, after the war, the French government selected Nicole to help care for concentration camp survivors in Switzerland. Nicole worked in Geneva, Saint Martin and Davos for six months. She acted as a social worker to the patients, visiting them, cheering them up, and taking them for walks. After her return from Switzerland in December 1945, she met her future husband, John Vanderford Long (1920-2004), an American Army medical corpsman from Tulsa, Oklahoma. John went back to the States for six months, returned to Paris in July 1946, and married Nicole in September. They moved to Chicago in 1948. John studied at the University of Chicago and entered law school. Nicole began a doctorate program in Ancient Greek, and she taught languages at many American universities for several years, until, in 1963 she established a program for continuing education for men and women. She and John had two children: Olivier and Silvia.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Sylvia Long

Donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2018 by Sylvia Long, daughter of Nicole Denier Long.