AI Educator: Why I Tell Students To Keep A Frustration Diary

From forbes.com

By Dan Fitzpatrick

There is a line from Mustafa Suleyman’s book, The Coming Wave, that I keep returning to. Suleyman, the co-founder of Google DeepMind, writes about children who grew up travelling by horse and cart in the late 19th century, but spent their final days flying on airplanes, living in houses heated by the splitting of the atom. All in one lifetime, from horse and cart to nuclear energy.

I mentioned this last week during a talk I gave for the UAE Girls in AI programme, founded by Abeda Natha, director of digital learning at GEMS Wellington International School. The students who joined me are going to live through something even more dramatic. The real question, I feel, is whether our education systems can get them ready for it or not.

A survey commissioned by Kingston University, which polled more than 2000 business leaders, found that 74 percent of those business leaders do not believe current graduates are prepared to succeed in a world of artificial intelligence. That is not a fringe concern; that is a near consensus.

What Has Changed?

To help the students make sense of this during my talk, I decided to walk them through some economics 101. That is, how the four factors of production have shifted across economic ages. Looking at the work of 18th century economist Adam Smith and then Alfred Marshall, we explored the classic framework of the four factors of production: land, capital, labour and entrepreneurship.

Going back to the feudal age, land was king. If you owned the land, you had the power. Then industry came along, the Industrial Revolution, and capital surged. You needed factories, machines, serious investment. At this time, labour became enormously more valuable than it ever had been because someone had to run those machines. Then the information age flipped it again. Suddenly you needed knowledge. Skilled, educated workers became the dominant factor.

Here is the thing. I think we are now entering the intelligence age. The economics are shifting again, quite radically. Capital requirements are collapsing. A laptop, a Wi Fi connection and a subscription to a powerful AI. That is your start-up kit.

Land barely registers for huge swathes of knowledge work. In the talk, I showed the students an image of a young woman sitting in a Starbucks with a laptop and asked them to look. All four factors of production were right there. The table was her land, her laptop was her capital, she was the labour, and the idea in her head was entrepreneurship. The barriers to build something have never been lower.

If capital costs have cratered and land is becoming irrelevant for digital work, what is left? I think it is entrepreneurship. By entrepreneurship, I do not mean in the sense of the Silicon Valley pitch deck, seed round culture. I mean entrepreneurial thinking, the ability to spot a problem, the creativity to imagine a fix, and the nerve to try building it.

In the session with the students, I gave them a simple exercise. Finish this sentence: “Someone really should make it easier to…” Then write down the first thing that pops into your head. Do not overthink it. Notice the friction in your daily life. This is where it starts.

I encouraged them to keep what I call a frustration diary. Every time you think this is annoying or why is there not a better way to do this, write it down. Then pick one a week and ask three questions. Who else has this problem? Would someone pay to fix it? Could I build a first version of this solution within a week?

That last question would have been laughable five years ago. In fact, it would have been laughable 12 months ago. Not anymore. A teenager with an idea and access to a powerful AI agent can prototype faster today than a funded start-up could manage even five years ago.

Humans Of The Gap

There is a concept I keep coming back to in my work, something I call the humans of the gap. As AI fills more of the capability space, writing code, generating content, crunching data and more, there is a temptation to place ourselves in the gaps, to get skilled in what AI cannot yet do. I get this question from parents almost weekly. What should my child be learning?

It is rooted in a flawed idea that we can thrive in the gaps where AI cannot perform yet. I think this is futile. The capability of AI will continue to increase and squeeze us out of those gaps. Instead, our human abilities become more valuable. Our judgement, our empathy, our ability to earn trust.

When talking with the students, I introduced them to an idea I have worked on with other groups: “the AI entourage”. I asked them to imagine that money was not an issue. Who would be in their entourage? What skills would their team have? The thing is, money is increasingly not the constraint. Any professional with AI “know-how” can work alongside a team of agents.

Think of it as an amplification layer. One person directing an AI entourage can handle work that used to require an entire department. The human directs. The AI executes. We outsource the doing, not the thinking.

This is a critical message for schools. In too many cases, we are still training students to be the doers, to store all knowledge, to follow instructions, and to produce standardised outputs. In the intelligence age, the doing is increasingly automated, and the value lies in directing, deciding, and imagining. It requires a fundamentally different educational model from what many are used to.

A young woman wearing headphones is focused on her laptop in a busy cafe, sipping coffee while immersed in work during a sunny afternoon in the city.      getty

The Liminal Space

I then moved on to something that matters just as much as the skills conversation. The awareness that we are in a liminal space right now. We are somewhere between the old world, where a degree automatically led to a career, where knowledge was the currency, where institutions could afford to move slowly, and a new world that has not quite taken shape yet.

In that in-between zone, it can feel disorienting, anxious, and uncertain. There is also something else in that overlap space. A chance to create the future. Not just react to it, but create it. For young people feeling overwhelmed by change, that is a powerful reframe. We can be agents in what comes next.

Finally, I shared the Japanese concept of Ikigai, a framework for finding your reason for being at the intersection of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. In this intelligence age, I would argue ikigai matters more than ever. When barriers to building are low, and AI handles much of the doing, the question that matters most is not what job should I get. It is what problem do I care about enough to solve? That is a question no AI can answer for you.

What does this mean for schools?

Every idea I shared with the UAE Girls in AI, from the economic shift to the frustration diary to the AI entourage, challenges how many schools currently operate. We are still preparing students for the information age. In some cases, we are still preparing them for the industrial age. Asking them to memorise, follow instructions, produce standardised outputs.

The intelligence age demands something different. Entrepreneurial instincts, creative problem solving, comfort with ambiguity and the ability to work with AI as a genuine partner. If graduates are falling short, then adding a coding module or hosting an AI awareness day will not be enough. The response needs to be structural and cultural. We need to rethink what we assess, how we teach and what we are actually preparing young people for.

Are we playing a finite game, optimising for exam results and university placements? Or are we playing an infinite game, building humans who can thrive at 25, 35, 45 and beyond?

William Gibson once wrote that the future is already here. It is just not evenly distributed. Some young people are already using AI, building things, thinking like entrepreneurial founders. Others are hearing these ideas for the first time. Some have yet to hear them at all. The distribution of the future depends in large part on the educators who choose to shape access to it.

The stakes have never been higher.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danfitzpatrick/2026/02/14/why-i-tell-students-to-keep-a-frustration-diary/

Diaries of Real New Yorkers 1870s

From ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com

Peek into the diary of a Manhattan schoolboy growing up in the booming city of the 1870s

“This morning I got up and had breakfast and went to school,” wrote Addison Allen on September 10, 1877. “When I got home from school at 3 o’clock I went out and played marbles and then I came in and picked some grapes . . . .Today it has been a nice day.”

Addison Allen is a name few New Yorkers would recognize. Born in 1865, this schoolboy and his family lived a middle-class life in a house at 31 East 127th Street in the urbanizing district of Harlem (but not too urban that residents could not still pick grapes in their own backyard, as Addison did.)

What makes Addison significant is that he kept a diary for a few years in the late 1870s, which he started at age 12. Even more incredible is that his diary is now part of the indispensable collection at New York Historical, perhaps donated by a relative who deemed it to be valuable.

And valuable it is. Newspaper archives and nonfiction deep dives are wonderful references, but personal diaries offer an intimate view of how people lived day to day—the activities they pursued, the holidays they celebrated, and their family dynamics.

Addison’s diary isn’t a collection of his hopes and dreams; it’s more like a journal where he catalogs the highlights of a particular day.

But seeing his writing on notebook paper helps me imagine him sitting at a desk every night recording his day by gaslight: school events, family interactions, and how he and his friends entertained themselves.

“Today Papa stayed home as he felt real sick this morning and vomited. “This afternoon papa felt better and he Mamma, Mamie, and I all went down to the London (?) Circus, we met Aunt Rebecka down there . . . . Tonight Papa and Mamma went out. Today has been an elegant day. Last night Auntie was here. Today was Walt’s birthday.

Addison often mentions his immediate family as well as aunts, uncles, and cousins often. His father, John, worked as a bookkeeper, perhaps in a downtown office that required him to commute to the lower city via the new elevated trains.

We don’t know his salary, but it provided the Allens with a comfortable home in a burgeoning district centered around 125th Street. Though people from all backgrounds lived in Harlem in the 1870s, it had a largely white population at this time.

His mother, Mary, seemed to take care of the home, tending to his thee siblings: older brother Walt, older sister Grace, and baby sister Mamie.

Addison wrote about his parents’ health, spending time in the park with Mamie and Grace (probably Mount Morris Park on 124th Street, which by this time was landscaped), going on family outings, and even taking a family vacation in the Catskills.

With his mom and sometimes his father, Addison went on shopping trips downtown to Macy’s on 14th Street and Brokaw Brothers Fine Clothing at Astor Place, where Addison, Walt, and Papa bought new suits at the 1878 prices of $20 and $12 (above).

What was their house like? Aside from a mention of a new rug arriving and a window being replaced, he doesn’t describe it. A tenement completed in 1905 now occupies the site of his former home.

But two neighboring Italianate brownstones were built in 1877 (second image, above), according to the Reconnaissance Historical Research Survey, East Central Harlem. The Allen house likely resembled those brownstones.

“Today I went to school. This afternoon when I came home I went into the yard. . . . The other day the boys got their monthly report and I stand number one in the class.”

Outside of his home and family, Addison’s world revolved around school and his friends. The location of his school isn’t known, but Addison was a good student. He noted his number one standing in his class in the above passage from December 1878.

“Today I went to school and when I came home at noon Will Gillmore was here,” Addison wrote on June 8, 1877, a Friday. “He and I went to the park and Mamie too.”

Later that evening, Addison talks about going with a friend to a hall “to see the views of the magic lantern.” After they’d seen “all the views, they gave all the people each a plate of ice cream. We got home at half past ten.”

A magic lantern was an early projector of visual images like photos and paintings. Think of them as the forerunner of movies, with the images forming a narrative. Magic lantern shows were a popular entertainment in Gilded Age New York, and Addison and his friends must have enjoyed the more dramatic shows.

The growing acceptance of leisure time and public entertainment in the late 19th century played a big role in Addison’s life. He goes to Central Park to watch the fireworks at 4th of July. He gets a ticket to the circus. He plays jacks and marbles. He plays some kind of ball game (and loses the ball one afternoon, according to his diary entry on June 22, 1877).

I think my favorite entries detail the Christmas mornings Addison wrote about, excitedly listing the presents he and his siblings received.

“This morning I got up at about quarter of seven and went downstairs to get my Christmas things and I got a printing press and a book [and] a large paper of candies and as Aunt Harriet and Uncle Andrew came last night they gave me a nice two-bladed knife but I liked the printing press best of all,” he wrote on December 25, 1877.

The next year, Addison hit the jackpot with gifts again. “This morning, I got up very early for Christmas. I got a lot of candy, an orange, some figs, and a nice large magic lantern, a book, and a steam engine. Mamie got candy, a book, a chair, a locket, and other things. Grace got a necktie and bottle of cologne and other things. Walt got two pins, two books, and other things.”

Addison’s diary ends when he’s in his early teens, but that isn’t the end of his story. Census data and newspaper archives reveal that he graduated from law school at Columbia, became an attorney, and continued living at the 31 East 127th Street address for several years.

In 1901 he got married. Census records from 1910 have him living with his wife, a Pennsylvania native named Sally, and their maid in the East 127th Street house, yet there’s no mention of his parents or siblings sharing the home with them. By the 1920 census, he and his wife have relocated to Yonkers.

I couldn’t find any details of his later adult life. But a 1940 obituary announced his death at age 75. Fittingly, Addison was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery—returned to the city that nurtured his childhood and gave him much to write about.

[Diary entries: New York Historical; last image: The Herald Statesmen, Yonkers NY]

https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/tag/diaries-of-real-new-yorkers-1870s/ 

Dear Diary: Confessions Of 3 Journal Devotees

From thegloss.ie 

Be inspired to put pen to paper …

A diary is more than a practical way of organising your time; it’s a repository for bright ideas, names you don’t want to forget and plans yet to be realised – each page a record of a life well lived.

For Lucinda Chambers, the co-founder of Collagerie and former Fashion Director of British Vogue, the act of keeping a diary has long been part of her daily routine. She calls them, and her selection of notebooks, constant companions. “They’re very representative of my life,” she reflects. “They keep it safe, purposeful and beautiful. For me, above all, they keep it colourful.” She has always kept a Smythson Soho diary, choosing a different colour to mark each year. This year’s colour is Cerulean.

It’s also an extension of her love of writing. “I’ve always enjoyed the physicality of pen and paper. I love to draw, one of my best Christmas presents was a set of over 100 brush felt tip pens. And, I love to write – letters, postcards – to receive something in the post with interesting stamps and writing on the envelope is always a delight.”

“When I look back at some of my old diaries, I love to see the way my life has evolved and changed through the years. You don’t think it has in the moments of hectic life, but it has and it’s good to be reminded of that sometimes. I don’t travel as much, which I love; I have a routine now that I didn’t have before. I have time to put in rituals and new habits that certainly weren’t there in my previous life!”

THE GLOSS Beauty Editor Sarah Halliwell says, “I’ve always been dedicated to paper diaries, and remain loyal to two types – Moleskine and Smythson. Smythson are luxurious, with wafer-thin paper that’s a pleasure to write on, but they’re pricey – sometimes you can get hold of a reduced-price one a few months into the year, though it does mean your life is chaos for several weeks. I judge it on a “cost per use” basis. Since it’s something that you use every single day, it’s worth having a good one.”

“I used to write a more personal diary throughout school, filling it with gig tickets (not cool ones), lengthy ramblings and angst, and even a plaster (from the time I trapped my finger in a door when drunk on cheap wine at a party, and a boy I was mad about kissed it better). Noel Coward I’m certainly not. While these teenage diaries are excruciating to read back, somehow I can’t quite throw them out. A reminder of another lifetime.”

“One constant throughout my life has been writing things down,” says THE GLOSS Contributing Editor Penny McCormick. “As a stationery addict from a very young age, I’ve accrued numerous diaries and notebooks, now locked in a trunk in the attic. I particularly like an A5 sized diary – Paperblank, Papier and Aspinal are favourites – and for 20 years I swapped to using red notebooks from Carolina Herrera as both a diary and journal. I used to carry them with me at all times, though unlike Oscar Wilde they did not fulfil his brief of ‘something sensational to read on the train!’”

“I went through a phase of writing gratitude lists each night (when processing a particularly bad break-up) in tandem with a brief synopsis of my day or quotes from films. Flicking through recent diaries I’ve found tickets, photos, postcards and the odd receipt of significant items I’ve bought – clutter to some, these often spark happy memories of people and places. This year, I’m using a much smaller leopard print Smythson pocket diary that I refer to throughout the day as it keeps me organised. I’m also trying to get back to writing in the evening, so I keep a Montblanc notebook by my bed to jot down more detailed notes.”

https://thegloss.ie/dear-diary-confessions-of-3-journal-devotees/

Nazi-era teen girl’s diary charts unravelling of France — and her prominent Jewish family

From timesofisrael.com

By Robert Philpot

Released in the UK on Jan. 22, ‘Ninette’s War’ by journalist John Jay examines darkest chapter in French history through a Dreyfus scion’s diary entries, family papers and interviews

LONDON — On the morning of June 23, 1940, 12-year-old Ninette Dreyfus’s family learned that Hitler had forced France into a humiliating armistice the previous evening.

Her father’s reaction to the news was visceral and physical. Edgar Dreyfus collapsed on the stairs, suffering an asthma attack and struggling to breathe. “I had never seen him show weakness before. For a moment, I feared he was going to die,” Ninette later recalled. “The whole world of my childhood was falling apart.”

But unbeknownst to Ninette, her father, or France’s Jews, much worse was to come.

Released in paperback in the UK on January 22, “Ninette’s War: A Jewish Story of Survival in 1940s France” tells the remarkable wartime odyssey of one of France’s most prominent Jewish families — and the Vichy regime’s knowing complicity in the Nazis’ crimes.

The story has been painstakingly pieced together — like “restoring a mosaic” — by British journalist John Jay, drawing on Ninette’s youthful diary entries, family papers, and interviews she gave to the author in the years before her death in 2021.

As Jay makes clear, Edgar’s reaction to news of the armistice did not reflect a sense of foreboding about the likely fate awaiting his family.

“He was completely dumbfounded that the mighty French army could collapse in the way that it had done,” he tells The Times of Israel. “French Jews at that point had no idea of what subsequently was going to hit them.”

                    Ninette Dreyfus at home in her father’s Paris study, 1939. (Courtesy of John Jay and Lady Swaythling and her family)

Jay’s book tracks Edgar’s growing sense of disbelief and horror at Vichy’s brutal betrayal of France’s Jews.

The Dreyfus family — second only in influence to the Rothschilds in Parisian Jewish society — were, Jay says, a “classic cosmopolitan, Jewish Western European family, a mixture of Bohemians, Germans and Frenchmen.”

They were also fiercely patriotic and loyal to the French state, which, by and large, had treated French Jewry well. Edgar ran a bank owned by the family firm, La Maison, which had provided loans to help France’s war effort after 1914. A decade later, Edgar acceded to the government’s request to help fight off an inflation-induced run on the franc. He was made an officer of the Légion d’honneur in recognition of his services.

In their grand 16th arrondissement townhouse — which had once been owned by composer Claude Debussy — Ninette, her elder sister Viviane and parents Edgar and Yvonne lived a life of plenty and privilege. The family were secular and, until the outbreak of war, Ninette barely knew what being a Jew was. Occasional antisemitic playground slurs had little meaning for her.

Life as an ‘exode’

Hitler’s May 1940 blitzkrieg against France changed all that. One month later, with the sound of artillery growing closer and German forces crossing the Seine, the Dreyfus family joined the “exode” — one of the largest movements of people in history — as 6 million people took to the roads to flee the Nazi advance, among them some 100,000 to 200,000 Jews.

Refugees in the French ‘exode’ flee the invading Germans on June 19, 1940. (Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1971-083-01 / Tritschler / CC-BY-SA 3.0)

After a three-week, 1,700-kilometer (roughly 1,050-mile) journey via Nantes, Bordeaux and Perpignan, Ninette and her family arrived in Marseille, where they took up residence in a hotel full of fellow exodians and Jews.

Already, the poisonous atmosphere caused by France’s defeat and humiliation had sparked a wave of antisemitism. Nonetheless, even as they travelled through Perpignan close to the Spanish border, Edgar, who had ties to the new Francoist regime, did not attempt to flee France.

The Riviera fell under the non-occupied “Free Zone,” which was governed from Vichy by the World War I hero Marshal Philippe Pétain. As Jay details, there was little to suggest Pétain — a onetime supporter of Alfred Dreyfus — harboured antisemitic inclinations. Indeed, alongside members of the International League Against Antisemitism, Edgar’s cousin, Louis, a senator, voted to grant Pétain authoritarian powers soon after the armistice.

But Pétain swiftly promoted antisemites to lead his new regime, creating a “permissive environment for antisemitism to flourish,” says Jay. In October 1940, the first antisemitic legislation barred Jews from certain professions, including teaching, journalism and the civil service, while sharply curtailing their role in the medical and legal professions. At Montgrand, Marseille’s grandest girls’ school, Ninette’s math teacher, Odette Valabrègue, was fired. Like the chief rabbi and French communal organizations, Edgar clung to the importance of the rule of law, even if the publication of now-infamous images of Pétain shaking hands with Hitler at Montoire in October 1940 led him to weep.

Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, right, shakes hands with head of Vichy France Philippe Petain, in occupied France, October 24, 1940. (AP)

Any lingering illusions about Pétain ended with the passage of further, sweeping antisemitic legislation in 1941, which, in a sharp break with the Third Republic’s avowed secularism, required Jews to register in a special census and expanded the list of professions, including banking, closed to them. The measures, which forced Edgar to relinquish his role as chief executive of La Maison, came as a “personal hammer blow,” writes Jay.

“Pétain’s first statute drove his friends from public service and the media and limited their participation in law and medicine, but he was not directly affected,” he says. “Now, Pétain was depriving him of his career and driving his family into a legal ghetto.”

Ninette later captured the psychological impact of the measures on her father, recalling: “Work was everything to Daddy, and it was torture for him to contemplate life without work.” Nor was the future much brighter for Edgar’s daughters, with university places and professional work all but closed to Jews.

The legal assault, the establishment of the new Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives, which began to plunder Jewish wealth, and the promotion of antisemitism in the media were accompanied by, and fed, rising Jew-hate on the streets. Ninette’s family heard the thud of the bomb that exploded in Marseille’s synagogue in May 1941.

Joining the resistance

No longer needing to be in Marseille, where La Maison had offices, Edgar moved his family to Cannes, which, although no less antisemitic, was filled with family and friends. Their new home, Villa Rochelongue, was a Belle-Époque seafront house near the Palm Beach Casino staffed with butlers and a cook, cleaner and gardener. Despite the war and food rationing — which led the family to keep a cow and rabbits — life “felt like the old Côte d’Azur,” says Jay. When not obsessing over her upcoming 15th birthday, Ninette penned diary entries about clothes, accessories and cosmetics, ballet, cinema trips, school and social life, sailing in the baie de Cannes, and her “passion” for football and volleyball.

Although somewhat cocooned by her parents, Ninette was not oblivious to the pernicious forces imperilling Vichy’s Jews. Her school headteacher, Marcelle Capron, was a résistante who later sheltered Jews and helped them flee. However, the school had its share of antisemitic teachers and pupils. Ninette, a self-described tomboy, fought girls who were members of Avant-Garde, the Pétainist youth movement.

Edgar, too, chose to resist, crossing what his daughter termed a “personal Rubicon” in spring 1943 by refusing to obey an order requiring all Jews to have the word “Juif” stamped in their ID and ration cards. While most French Jews followed their communal leaders’ advice to continue obeying Vichy’s laws, Edgar’s decision was, Ninette said, “the most significant moment of the war.”

‘Ninette’s War,’ by journalist John Jay. (Courtesy of Pegasus Books)

“He was defining himself as an outlaw, no easy decision for a man in late middle age with teenage daughters and a position in society,” she said. Decades later, Ninette discovered files in France’s Archives Nationales revealing that he been denounced, triggering a police investigation. Six months late, Edgar led his family to the mairie to have their papers stamped.

Both Edgar — who joined a coastal reception committee for a Royal Navy boat carrying British agents and collecting résistants — and Vivian began to engage in secret resistance activities.

However, perhaps the most powerful example of the family’s resistance came in its evolving relationship to Judaism. As the atmosphere darkened, Yvonne recognized her daughters would be more resilient in the face of societal antisemitism if they felt pride in their heritage. She taught them that they should be both proud of Jews’ traditions and achievements, and recognize that with success came a responsibility to those in need. Those lessons bore fruit. Ninette remembered that her reaction to having her ID stamped with “Juif” was not one of humiliation, but pride.

“My parents became more interested in Judaism,” Ninette recalled. “Others ran away; we moved closer.” During Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in 1942, Edgar and his wife and children attended services for the first time since participating in family bat mitzvahs in the 1930s. “For Mummy and Daddy,” Ninette believed, “taking part in a service after decades of non-observance was an act of defiance.”

However, back in Paris, which was occupied by the Germans, tragedy was enveloping members of the family — including Edgar’s sisters, Louise and Alice, Alice’s daughter, Maryse, and her husband, disabled veteran André Schoenfeld. André, a holder of the Croix de guerre and Légion d’honneur, was arrested in 1941 by French police at a reunion dinner for World War I wounded and sent to the notorious Drancy internment camp.

News of André’s arrest hit Edgar and his family hard. “Nothing would ever be the same again,” believed Vivianne; France was treating its Jews as “abject rot, putrid larvae to be crushed.” The family also learned of the horrors which had unfolded during the Val d’Hiv roundup in July 1942, when some 8,000 Jews, almost 4,000 of whom were children, were held together in the sports arena in appallingly overcrowded conditions for five days before being deported. “It is horrible, demonic, something that grabs you round the throat so you can’t cry out,” a letter from an eyewitness, a social worker, circulating on the Riviera revealed. “I’ll try to describe what it looks like, but if you multiply whatever you understand by 1,000, it will still be only part of the reality.”

But, even at this moment, elements of the family’s past life continued: That August, Edgar took his family on holiday to Mont-Revard’s Grand Hôtel, a luxury Alpine retreat they had visited before the war. In her diary, Ninette recorded she had “a fantastic time” riding horses and playing tennis, croquet, golf and ping-pong.

As Jay says, it is important to note that the family was “in ignorance of a lot of what was going on in the north and … didn’t know what was happening once the transports [took] people to the east.” As late as 1943, most exodians, he suggests, believed that forced labour was the worst fate awaiting French Jews. When two Auschwitz escapees, Haïm Salomon and M. Honig, returned to Nice looking for their families and detailed the horrors they had witnessed to a local Jewish committee, their testimony was dismissed. The men, it was decided, must have lost their minds, with one of Edgar’s pre-war friends, who chaired the committee, telling a colleague: “Such atrocities… are not conceivable… in the middle of the 20th century.”

Ninette (right) and Viviane Dreyfus outside the Martinez Hotel in Marseille. (Courtesy of John Jay and Lady Swaythling and her family)

However, even as a series of Allied victories in 1942 pointed to defeat for the Nazis, it was clear that the danger had by no means passed. Indeed, for the family, the moment of maximum peril came in autumn 1943 when the Germans occupied the Riviera and, to prevent it from deserting the Axis, invaded Italy.

Going into hiding

Having acquired false identification papers forged by a former employee of La Maison, Edgar, his wife and daughters travelled by train from Cannes to Marseille and then onto Pau, close to the Pyrenees. “It was exciting to hold those false papers,” Ninette recalled. “I felt like a character in a book.”

Their escape highlights that, amid the betrayals and collaboration perpetrated by Vichy and its friends, there were also those who attempted to assist their fellow Jewish citizens. As the Germans searched for Edgar, the family’s neighbours in Cannes provided them with shelter.

In Pau, Pierre Barthe, a horse breeder who knew the family, hid them in his villa while hatching the audacious plan that would see them safely guided across the mountains to Spain by Henri Delhiart, one of the Pyrénées’ great smugglers. The escape was hardly without incident. Barthe purloined an ambulance and had Ninette pose as a tuberculosis patient to speed their passage to the French spa town Cambo-les-Bains, where Delhiart took the reins. He chose a bar frequented by German border guards as their rendezvous point, correctly calculating, as Jay writes, that “the one place Germans would not suspect as a starting point for an evasion would be their own watering hole.” And Ninette remembered later hiding in a ditch from Germans troops who passed so close that she felt as if their dogs were breathing on her. Luckily, as Delhiart had planned, the wet night ensured the dogs couldn’t pick up her scent.

An undated photo of smuggler Henri Delhiart, who guided the Dreyfus family across the Pyrénées mountains from France into a safer Spain. (Courtesy of John Jay and Lady Swaythling and her family)

After reaching the safety of Spain, the family spent the final months of the war lodging at Madrid’s luxurious Palace Hotel, socializing with Anglophile monarchists and dodging the attentions of German spies and fascist sympathizers.

In April 1945, nearly five years after her departure, Ninette returned to Paris. But the occupation had shattered the family forever. As they slowly discovered, André and Maryse were murdered at Auschwitz in August 1943. With her possessions and property expropriated by the Nazis, Aunt Louise died alone in her attic room in Paris in May 1943, while, alongside 327 children, Aunt Alice was deported to Auschwitz four weeks before the city’s liberation.

Later in life, Ninette worked to ensure that those who had helped the family were recognized. Thanks to her efforts, in 1980 Yad Vashem declared Barthe and his wife Righteous Among the Nations.

But she would never shake the feeling that French Jews had been betrayed by their own.

“Her disdain for her countrymen was even greater than her abhorrence of German Nazis,” Jay writes. “The Germans were foreigners; the French were her people, yet they had turned their backs on her and worse during the years in which she came of age.”

https://www.timesofisrael.com/nazi-era-teen-girls-diary-charts-unraveling-of-france-and-her-prominent-jewish-family/