Yvonne Hagnauer (1898 – 1998) was a French pedagogue whose school welcomed Jewish children and war orphans from 1941. She was a Righteous Among the Nations.
Engaged teacher
Yvonne Eugénie Pauline Even was born on September 9, 1898 into a family of Breton origin, in Pavillons- undergrowth in Ile-de-France. She studied brilliantly and obtained a certificate of general education "History, Letters, English" as well as a diploma from the University of Cambridge.
Feminist and committed, she became an English teacher at the Sup'de Co' school in Paris and was an activist in the National Teachers' Union (SNI). In 1925, she married Roger Hagnauer, also a teacher and a committed trade unionist. Militant for new methods of education, she participated in the organization of the International Congress of Education in 1937.
The House of Sèvres
In 1938, Yvonne Hagnauer co-founded the Women's League for Peace. In 1939, Roger and she signed the “Immediate Peace” manifesto; this position resulted in them being expelled from public education by the Daladier government; they will be reinstated three years later. Invested in the Resistance, Yvonne was asked by the Secours National, in June 1941, to run a summer camp and then a children's home, the Maison de Sèvres.
The Maison de Sèvres first aims to welcome precarious, abandoned and undernourished young people from the Paris region; gradually, many Jewish children were entrusted to the house run by Yvonne, by Resistance networks or by teacher friends of the Hagnauer couple. Yvonne and Roger made them or provided them with false papers and allied themselves with the assistance of civil and religious authorities. The Maison de Sèvres also hides adults, Jews, Freemasons, resistance fighters...
The House of Sèvres after the war
Visits from officials alerted the residents of the Maison de Sèvres several times, but none were arrested, apart from Roger Hagnauer, whom a nurse denounced as a Jew; he will escape and remain hidden until the Liberation. At the end of the war, most of the children did not see their families return and remained at the Maison de Sèvres. Many war orphans joined them there.
For this population of orphaned children, traumatized by the war, abandoned by their families, Yvonne Hagnauer sets up a new pedagogy, synthesizing different pedagogical thoughts and betting among other things on:awakening the interest of children, their responsibility , their creativity and their taste for effort.
Yvonne Hagnaeur was designated Righteous Among the Nations in 1974. She died on 1 st November 1985 in Meudon, aged 87.
Sources and useful links
Biography of Yvonne Hagnaeur
The Righteous Among the Nations
The House of Sèvres