Labour of Love

Wooden boat engraved with 'Charles’ and 'Pithiviers 1941-1942', made for Charles Feldman by his father, Icek (Isaac) Feldman, while interned in Pithiviers - the transit camp for Jewish deportees in occupied France during World War II. Charles, who was born in 1937 in Paris, was four-years-old the last time he saw his father.

Conditions at Pithiviers were initially tolerable; to combat boredom inmates did useful tasks, such as making souvenirs as gifts. Objects were crudely cut from blocks of wood in the carpentry workshop then finished and polished in the barracks with small personal tools. The mushrooming of model boats prompted one inmate to write in his journal, “One activity is developing every day: ‘shipyards’. The number and the models is proliferate.” Another inmate wrote to his fiancé in September 1941 that he was spending his time engraving boats, “I take 5 francs for a work of 20 to 30 minutes, but often I ask to be paid in bread.” Most of the boats had a dedication for a child.

Paula, Charles’s mother, visited her husband during 1941 and 1942. On one of the visits he gave her boats for the children, one for Charles and one for his sister Jacqueline. In July 1942, Icek was deported to Auschwitz and murdered.

That same month, Paula and her children were arrested in the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup. They managed to escape to the Free Zone in the southern countryside, where they were eventually picked up by the Resistance. Charles and Jacqueline were hidden with orphans in a Catholic convent at Castera-Verduzan, near the Spanish border, while their mother was hidden with a Catholic family on a farm in central France.

After liberation, Charles remained in the orphanage. When he turned 11, Paula took steps to send him to his sister in Australia. Charles arrived in 1950. When he returned to France to visit his mother in 1965, she gave him the boat. A concierge where they lived had stored it during the war.

The boat represents a labour of love that a father made for his son.