In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks — and as antisemitism spiked worldwide in the months that followed — Gabriel Scheinmann found comfort in his grandfather’s Holocaust survival story. Now, amid the recent release of his grandfather’s memoir-like biography, I Am André: German Jew, French Resistance Fighter, British Spy, Scheinmann said he hopes an “unusual story of Jewish defiance, a real-life story of espionage, courage and resistance,” as he calls it, will resonate with Jewish and non-Jewish readers in a post-Oct. 7 world.

“It’s a story about being a fighter, being a warrior, not just merely being a victim. That is a timeless story but in particular resonates over the last 15 months,” Scheinmann, executive director of the Alexander Hamilton Society, told Jewish Insider. 

The book, based on a memoir that André Joseph Scheinmann wrote in the 1990s about his experiences, was written by Diana Mara Henry, a photojournalist and friend of the family who spent three decades poring over military records and piecing together André’s story. Her research included hundreds of hours of interviews with André and other Holocaust survivors who knew him. Spanning nearly 500 pages, the book was published in London in October.

“A couple of steps in André’s story are more relevant today than ever since the conflagration of World War II,” Henry said at a book launch event. “André comes to show us what some can do under the most ambiguous circumstances to define and act on world events.” 

Born in Germany in 1915, Joseph Scheinmann and his family left for France in 1933 after his father had spoken out against Adolf Hitler. With war seemingly imminent, he joined the French army and was given a pseudonym, André Peulevey, to hide both his German and Jewish identities. He fought in Belgium and escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp after the French surrender in summer 1940. Despite suffering an injury in Belgium, he went on to join the French resistance, becoming a spy and saboteur for the British and Free French, overseeing a network of 300 operatives, while working undercover as a translator and liaison with the German High Command at the Brittany headquarters of the French National Railroads (SNCF). “With the information he’d give, they’d sabotage or bomb the train tracks,” Scheinmann said of his grandfather’s work. Summoned by the British, Andre crossed the English Channel for initiation and training as an MI6 agent in England.

In his absence, he was betrayed by someone in his spy network and arrested— not as a Jew but as a resistance fighter— on his return to France. He spent over a year in Gestapo prisons outside of Paris, including 11 months in solitary confinement and 33 interrogations, followed by another 14 months in the little-known Natzweiler concentration camp in Alsace. Following the allied invasion of Normandy, he was transferred to Dachau and Allach. Even in the camps, where punishment was death, André worked to slow or sabotage Nazi operations and save his fellow campmates. He was liberated by the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions of the U.S. Army on April 29, 1945. 

His parents, Max and Regina, were murdered in Auschwitz.

André died 20 years ago at age 86. Scheinmann was 15 years old at the time. “Only in the last decade of his life did he begin sharing his war experience and service. Until then, I only knew my grandfather, well, as my grandfather,” Scheinmann recalled. “He would treat us, charm us, and never ever complain about the physical pain he was in. Only later did I realize it was these very same characteristics — wit, guile and resilience — that led him to choose fight over flight, and to survive.” 

The memoir that André eventually wrote in his 70s was “his way of realizing that if you don’t pass along the story, how do you learn the lessons from it,” according to his grandson. “The lessons that he wanted to give off was ‘never again,’ sure, but more importantly, ‘never give up.’”  

Neither Scheinmann nor his grandfather could have predicted just how timely the story would be by the time it was published, one year after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.   

Scheinmann said his grandfather’s reactions to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks “would have been simple.”

“When evil people say things, they mean them,” he said. “The rise of the Nazis was not a surprise … my grandfather would have looked at the statements of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran over many years and seen that there were no surprises there. It’s pure evil.” 

“We can’t take away from the sadness and victimhood that all Jews felt since Oct. 7, but at the same time, the fact that there’s a Jewish state fighting — and the outcome post Oct. 7 is different from all the past massacres of Jews in history — it’s a very different story,” Scheinmann told JI. 

“This is [also] a story about a Jewish fighter,” he said. “We need more stories of Jewish warriors and Jewish James Bonds.”