Henri Héritier and his wife Emma ran a farm in La Fayolle, a suburb of Le-Chambon-sur-Lignon in Massif Central, southern France. They had four children.
The Protestant family took in persecuted Jews on several occasions. Madeleine Dreyfus from the children’s aid organization OSE also placed Jewish children with them.
In 1943, 20-year-old Oscar Rosowsky and his friend Samy Charles stayed with the Héritiers. Rosowsky was persecuted as a Jew, while Charles had escaped from a forced labor deployment. The two men set up a forgery workshop at the farm, providing forged papers to people in hiding in the region. Henri Héritier hid the material in one of his beehives. The two forgers paid only a small amount for their food and accommodation.
The Jewish Sauvage family was living in hiding nearby with their new-born son Pierre. The Héritiers became friends with them, their daughter Éva Héritier taking care of the baby.
The Israeli Holocaust memorial center Yad Vashem honored Emma and Henri Héritier as Righteous Among the Nations in 1987.
Henri and Emma Héritier in front of their farmhouse in La Fayolle, March 1944. Source: Film „Weapons of the Spirit“, 1987
Pages from Madeleine Dreyfus’s notebook listing names and locations of farmers and the number of children they were willing to take in, including the Héritiers in La Fayolle on the right-hand page, 1942. Source: Lieu de Mémoire au Chambon-sur-Lignon
