| A group of children hold hands during an outside game at the Maison des Pupilles children’s home, Aspet, France. The girl in the front center, facing the camera, has been identified as Eva Ruth Boden, née Herz (born June 25, 1935). Born in Mannerheim, Germany, Eva Ruth Herz was transported to the Gurs Camp in February 1941. These children reached the home through the efforts of the Children’s Aid Society (Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants; OSE) and the American Friends Service Committee. Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE) is a charitable Jewish organization founded in Russia in 1913 to help destitute Jews receive a minimum amount of food and health care. It created orphanages and looked after the elderly. After the Russian Revolution, it moved its headquarters to Berlin, Germany, and had branch offices in Poland, Lithuania and Romania. In 1933, it moved to Paris, France. During World War II, OSE was active in trying to save the lives of Jewish children, either by taking over castles and large estates where many children could be housed or by finding Gentile families who would take them in. In October 1940, some 7,500 German Jews, mostly women, children and elderly men from Baden and surrounding areas, were deported in 1 of the few aktions that sent them West of Germany. Typhus and dysentery broke out. On 15 February 1941, the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (Children’s Aid Society) installed a medical post and obtained permission to take numerous children away from Gurs, who would be housed in private homes throughout France. Alice Resch Synnestvedt (December 14, 1908 – 2007), a Norwegian-American Quaker working for the American Friends Service Committee, spent 6 months in Gurs Internment Camp. There she and other Quakers falsified documents, hiding adults and children, and smuggling them out to hide with sympathetic French families under false names. In January 1943, Americans working for relief organizations in France were interned by the Germans. Resch, a Norwegian citizen, remained free in the Toulouse area, continuing her work with the Quakers. Herz was 1 of those children, receiving identity papers to go to Lisbon, Portugal. On July 10, 1942, she arrived in Baltimore, Maryland on the steamship Nyassa, which made numerous voyages taking refugees from Portugal, Spain, and Morocco to the United States, OSE began planning to move Jewish children to Switzerland after Germany occupied Vichy France in November 1942. Smuggling children into the Italian occupation zone of France started in April 1943. After Germany occupied all of France in September 1943, arrest of OSE operatives almost terminated the transports. In March 1944 they resume at an accelerated rate, carried out jointly by the OSE, the 6th (the clandestine circuit EIF) and the Zionist youth Movement (MJS). Arrested OSE agents died in Auschwitz. Eventually the whole OSE network went underground by February 1944. After the war, OSE social workers searched for the children and tried to bring them back to their families or distant relatives. OSE also ran orphanages for children who had lost all relatives and tried to give them an understanding of Judaism and Jewish culture. Herz became an American citizen on August 24, 1954. That same year she married Ronald Boden (January 8, 1932 – October 27, 2017). They had 3 children and 4 grandchildren. | |
| Image Filename | wwii0597.jpg |
| Image Size | 803.40 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 3300 x 2214 |
| Photographer | |
| Photographer Title | |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | January 1, 1941 |
| Location | |
| City | Aspet |
| State or Province | Occitania |
| Country | France |
| Archive | |
| Record Number | |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
Author of the World War II Multimedia Database