Marguerite Quddus

Marguerite Élias Quddus was born to a Jewish family living Paris. Her parents Rachel and Maurice had emigrated to France from Lithuania and opened a furrier business. She was a small child when Nazi Germany invaded her country in World War II. In August 1941, her father was taken away from their home in one of the first roundup of Jews; he was sent to the transit camp at Drancy, and deported to the death camp at Auschwitz. He never returned. Then in 1942, her mother was rounded up, but released the same day thanks to the intervention of a friend in the Prefecture de Police. After this close call, Rachel took Marguerite and her older sister Henriette to the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE), the Jewish children’s aid society. They began a three-year clandestine journey, sent by the OSE to hide in various farms and convents under the identity of French Catholics. The sisters and and their mother survived and were reunited in Paris after the Liberation. Rachel remarried and had another child, Benoît. Marguerite finished elementary school and enrolled in a technical college, but could not complete her studies because of financial difficulties. For several years, she worked at low-paid jobs at the post office and in the government. In 1965, she married Abdul Quddus, with whom she would have a son. Her husband was offered a teaching position at the University of British Columbia, and the couple moved to Vancouver in 1967 and then to Quebec. Marguerite became active in volunteer teaching and gave talks to thousands of students about her wartime experiences. Her memoir, In Hiding (French translation, Cachée), which she illustrated herself, was published in 2013 as part of The Azrieli Foundation Series of Holocaust Survivor Memoirs.