This article results from the exploitation of a documentary fund relating to a French officer of Jewish confession, taken prisoner after the defeat of 1940, then retained in a prison camp, in Austria first, in the oflag XVIIIA of Lienz, then in Germany in the Lübeck oflag XC. With the letters exchanged between the officer and the members of his family who remained in France, the reader is projected into the past, on the brink of World War II, plunged into the whirlwind that swept away the families and dispersed them across the european continent. The situation of French families of Jewish faith is emblematic of this turmoil.