December 14 1945 – 10 Tevet 5706
Lucy Dreyfus, wife of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer falsely accused of leaking military secrets to the Germans, died in Paris. Lucy’s letters to her “darling Fred” during his incarceration on Devil’s Island for a crime he didn’t commit testify to her role in encouraging her husband and pursuing the legal campaign to reopen his case. She continued to fight to clear his name until he was completely exonerated.
Lucy fled Paris with her children and grandchildren in 1940, aged seventy-three, and survived the Holocaust thanks to the efforts of the French Resistance, who kept her in hidden in a convent under a false identity. She returned to Paris at the end of the war, and was buried together with Alfred in Montparnasse cemetery. The name of their grand-daughter, Madeleine Levy, is also marked on their grave; she was a Red Cross social worker and an active member of the French Fighting Resistance. Arrested by the Nazis in November 1943, she was sent to Drancy concentration camp and, a week later, to Auschwitz where she was murdered. She was twenty-five.