Joseph Joffo

His memoir Un sac de billes (A Bag of Marbles), written as a novel, tells the story of Joffo as a young Jewish boy during the Holocaust.[1] When Joffo was ten, his father gave him and his brother five thousand francs each and instructions to flee Nazi-occupied Paris by foot, train and bus, and join their brothers Henri and Albert in Menton on the Mediterranean coast, where they would be safe in Vichy France, unoccupied by the Nazis. The book "A Bag of Marbles" tells of this journey.[3]

Joffo in 2012

Joffo and his twelve-year-old brother Maurice travel south across France by themselves. They are attempting to escape from the grasp of Hitler's SS men as the Nazis infiltrate France. They travel through northern France to the demilitiarised zone in the south. The boys then spend four blissfully safe months in Menton on the border of France and Italy with their older brothers Henri and Albert, before having to leave the town for Nice where their parents are waiting.

Joffo returns to the city of Paris, shortly after its liberation is announced, in a crowded train. Maurice returns in greater style by road and also takes enough cheese with him to sell for a large profit. They are reunited with their family in the barbershop - although sadly not with their father, who perished in a concentration camp before the end of the war.

Joffo also wrote Anna et son orchestre (Anna and Her Orchestra), which tells the story of Joseph's mother from the time she was 11 years old to the time she met Joseph Joffo's father in Paris.

His novel Baby-foot, published in 1977, follows on from Un sac de billes and describes his life in Paris following World War II and his discovery of American values.

La Vieille dame de Djerba, published in 1984, was written after Joffo met a woman called Liza at a synagogue in Djerba, an island off the coast of Tunisia. He was amazed to discover, after assuming she was a beggar and offering her money, that she knew the names of his mother and grandmother.