3) Commémoration de la grève insurrectionnelle du 10 août 1944
 2) La grève insurrectionnelle de la Libération
 1) Les cheminots dans la Résistance

On trovera ci-joint un article sur ma tante, Mme. Edith Rosenbaum, née
Caspary. Son mari était mon oncle, Samuel Rosenbaum, de New Jersey,
soldat Américain pendant la Guerre 1944-45, a après la Guerre, avec le Military Government en Allemagne. Elle n’a jamais ecrit ses mémoires, et l’article dans un journal de New Jersey est le seul récit écrit de sa vie. Maintenant, moi et un ami de la famille sont à recherche de documentation dan des archives, ou ailleurs. L’article s’explique, si on peut lire l’anglais. C’est vraiment "a fantastic story." En plus, je suis fier de ma tante, allemande, qui avait le courage de se battre contre le fascisme.

A propos de votre article, peut-on préciser le lieu ou les nazis ont assassiné les 23 cheminots français.

Je serais très reconnaissant de reçevoir des renseignements.

Art Rosenbaum
Professeur, University of Georgia, Athens GA USA

Fantastic Tale Unfolds In Naturalization Court : Wayne Woman, Registered as Foreign Agent, Tells of Work Against Nazis

by Thurston M. Egbert, Jr., Herald-News, 8/28/58

This is one of those fantastic tales that its teller, Mrs. Edith Rosenbaum, had hoped she would never have to reveal.
Becomes An American
But a part of the story had to be told to County Judge Donald G. Collester, Tuesday, before Mrs.. Rosenbaum a German, could be naturalized as an American.
She registered in 1950 under the Internal Security Act as a foreign agent. Judge Collester noted this as he read the government’s report of her case.
Mrs. Rosenbaum explained that her activities as a foreign agent involved working against the Nazis before and during World War II. She had been part of the anti Hitler German underground which worked with English, French and Swiss authorities before the war broke out.
With this much out, and curiously piqued, the rest had to be told. So Mrs. Rosenbaum and her husband Samuel sat down in their Woodlot Road home yesterday afternoon to tell the tale which until now had never been published.
Newspaper Writer
In 1933 Mrs. Rosenbaum, then Edith Caspary, was working for a Bremen, Germany daily newspaper as a music critic. She also did freelance writing and radio work.
She was the daughter of an officer in the Imperial German Army and came from an old Catholic family.
But with Hitler’s ascendancy came a new law in 1933 requiring all Germans to join some branch of the Nazi party.
This the young Miss Caspary refused to do, because, she said, she disliked what the Nazis already were doing to Jews and others who refused to “go along”.
From the time of this first resistance to the New order, the idealistic young writer was under surveillance. In 1934 she went to Saarbruechen, which at that time was still independent of Germany. There she came in contact with other young journalists who shared her feelings against the Nazis.
When she returned to Germany, later that year, she said, “I was young, and I opened my mouth too much.” And she was asked to leaver Germany, for good.
The end of 1934 found her working as a free lance journalist in Switzerland. Here she met other Germans, who had been forced to leave their country because of religious or political views.
Contacts Old Guard
Through this group, Miss Caspary made her first contact with the German Army underground, a group of old guard officers already plotting to do away with the fanatical Hitler.
As Rosenbaum points out, parenthetically, these Prussian officers were opposed to Hitler, not so much on moral grounds, as on grounds that he was an upstart corporal who was wielding more power than was good.
Nonetheless, Miss Caspary was now well involved in the resistance movement, which at that time was directed to collection and dissemination of anti-Hitler propaganda inside Germany.
The next year, 1938, the underground began to lay plans for the first attempt to assassinate Hitler.
Ironically, it was Miss Casparty’s involvement in these plans for Hitler’s murder which later was to save her own life.
The assassination was to take place in November 10, 1939. On May 9, 1940, the day before, the invading German troops arrived. And later, on July 20, she got out of Paris just as the Nazi columns approached.
A few days after the natural death of General Reichennau in 1940 his secret files were found by the Gestapo. Among them was information which definitely linked Edith Caspary to the resistance. From this time on, Nazi authorities actively sought her.
And, they found her in November, 1942, in a hotel in Upper Savoie, in the French Alps near the Swiss border, where she was working with the French Maquis resistance.
Three Nazis came to her room and asked her to accompany them. But before they left the hotel, the trip interrogated the manager and chambermaid about Miss Caspary. White the Nazis were busy browbeating the hotel personnel, Miss Campary relates, she calmly walked out the front door, past a soldier and a fixed bayonet, and down the street to a friend’s home and eventual safety.
The friend, a French custom official, provided a car and driver in which she escaped to the Swiss border, driving all the way under a pile of potato bags in the back seat.
The following year, in November, 1943, she was arrested again. But this time she did not get away. She had been turned in by a colleague in the movement, who she says got some short-lived personal benefit from the betrayal.
Mow began the most harrowing part of the woman’s experience. For the next 18 months, with only brief interruption, she was kept in solitary confinement.
Many Executed
The SD, Heinrich Himmler’s elite of elite guard, had informed her she would be shot. The only thing they neglected to tell her was when. During this time, many of associates were executed.
During her stay in Frennes, the Paris prison, she had a daily meal of potato peelings and lukewarm water. “You don’t know how good that is, when you’re hungry,” she added, wryly
It was also while she was here that the famous 20th of July (1944) attempt on Hitler’s life was made.
And a strange thing happened that day Fresnes prison. Acting on what turned out to be a false report of the success of the try, the German army officers rounded up hundreds of SS, SD and Gestapo troops and filled the prison with them.
The next day, when the failure of the attempt was known, the tables were turned, and the cells were filled instead with Army officers who were later executed.
On August 11, 1944, she was taken from the Paris prison, when American troops were only 15 miles away, to the railroad station.
There, she and other prisoners sat from 2 p.m. to 3 a.m. the next day while the Nazis tried to find a French engineer to run a train out of Paris.
23 Engineers Shot
During that time, Miss Caspary witnessed the execution of 23 engineers who refused to operate the locomotive. When one finally was found to drive the train, it left for Berlin.
There, for another nine months, she sat in solitary confinement, expecting any time to be shot.
She learned later that the reason she was not executed was that the SD had marked on her file “She’s our special pigeon.” The reason for this was that the SD knew she had been involved in the earliest attempt on Hitler’s life, and assumed she knew the identities of persons in the 20th of July try.
Miraculously, the Nazis never got around to killing her before the end of the war. As the Russians approached Berlin, in April, 1945, all women political prisoners, Miss Caspary included, were freed.
The men, incidentally, were shot.
Here, Mrs. Rosenbaum tells of a particularly nightmarish incident.
She got her cane, which she needed because malaria had affected ler legs, and wandered out into the streets of Berlin and the crossfire of Russian and German rockets and artillery.
As she walked along the street, not caring whether a shell hit her, she saw a man sitting atop a dead horse, cutting meat from its carcass.
She asked him to cut her some steaks which he did. With several fresh horsemeat steaks draped over one arm, and her cane in the other hand, she hobbled up the street, and came upon a bakery shop.
Fresh Bread
Unbelievably, in the midst of the battle this shop was open for business, and its proprietor had just finished baking a fresh load of bread.
She got some bread, and took it and the dripping horsemeat to the home of a friend. There, she, the friend and some German Army deserters made a feast of the unaged meat.
“It was the best meal I ever had,” Mrs. Rosenbaum said in retrospect, “even though we all became deathly sick afterward.”
After the war was over, she went to work for the American Military Government, met Rosenbaum, who was in U.S. Army intelligence. He, a Jew, and she were married, came to this country in 1948.
In this country for the past 10 years they have enjoyed relative anonymity, both have some misgivings abut the future affect of the revelation of Mrs. Rosenbaum’s story on their lives.
They run a home furnishing business in Paterson, have no children, and arrange their time so they can go fishing in the Caribbean fairly often.
Tuesday, after eight years of waiting, while the government looked into her past, never knowing whether she might be deported, Mrs. Rosenbaum was granted her coveted U.S. citizenship.