Audio clip 1 from interview with Maurice "Maury" Halfon Behar, March 14, 2016

I had a very uneventful, spoiled life until the age of four. I was an only child at that point even though my mother was pregnant when she died. The only reason I'm alive today is because when they came for my parents, I was sick with the measles. I remember the knock on the door, like two in the morning. My father opened the door and there was a whole bunch of gendarmes with a Nazi officer in the background. They asked my father if he was Isaac Halfon and my father said, "Yes." He says, "Ali vie;" come with us. My father said to him?I was in his arms, "My son is sick with the measles. Can I leave him behind?" The gendarme looked at the German officer and he shook his head yes and that's the only reason I'm alive today. All the neighbors had gathered around. My father saw Marie Cazous and he said to her, "You mind taking care of my son until I come back?" She said, "Of course not." He gave her a whole bunch of money and she took me back to her apartment, which was a floor above us. Of course, my parents never came back and I spent the rest of the war years, until 1947, passing off as her son. She was a spinster. What year was it they knocked on your parents' door? January 12, 1944. I found out later on that my mother and all the females, as soon as they got off the train, were sent to the right, which meant the gas chambers. My father and David Bally, my uncle, were sent to the left, which meant work detail. They survived the rest of the war somehow. Two weeks before the end of the war, they were sent on a train back to Germany as slave laborers and the allies bombed the tracks. So the train had to stop and the Germans told everybody to get off. My uncle, David Bally, got off the train and told my father, "Come on." My father said, "I'll be right with you." My uncle got off the train and my father never showed up. My uncle went back on the train and he found my father dead in his seat. He probably died of exhaustion or whatever. The Germans, the wonderful people they are, took his body and threw it in a ditch. So his body was never found. My parents' bodies were never found. When I went back to the Holocaust Museum with my sister when it first opened in the early '90s, I looked for them and there was no trace of them. I asked the people there and they said, "We have no record of them." So I entered them into the registry and now they're part of the victims.