Blanche Le Bris

Blanche Le Bris was born Blyma Menner on 25 September 1920 in Poland, the daughter of Adolf Menner and Rosa Menner, born Bromberger, both from Przytkowice. In 1922, when she was two, the family fled the rise of antisemitism and pogroms and emigrated to France, settling in Brest in Finistere.

Her parents, non-practising Jews hoping for a better life, opened a leather goods shop that did well. Blanche grew up in a pre-war Brest she later described as full of noise and joy. She was a bright pupil, but when she enrolled at school the authorities asked her parents to give her a French first name, and Blyma, meaning flower in Polish, became Blanche. Family accounts reported late in her life said her father's real name was Yankel Wallach, and that he had used a cousin's identity to avoid conscription into the Polish army.

In 1941 Blanche married Pierre Le Bris in Quimper, converting to Catholicism at her in-laws' wish a week before the Vichy regime banned interfaith marriages. Their daughter Jacqueline was born in April 1942. Fleeing the bombing of Brest, the family took refuge at La Roche-Maurice. On the night of 9 to 10 October 1942, in a round-up by the German authorities with the help of the French gendarmerie, her parents were arrested; Blanche escaped at the last moment through the woods. Adolf and Rosa Menner were deported from Drancy to Auschwitz on convoy 40 on 4 November 1942 and did not return.

Blanche and Pierre went underground. They left six month old Jacqueline with the Rognant family in Quimper, who raised her as their own for three years at great risk, and reached occupied Paris, where they survived in a boarding house on false papers, changing lodgings until the Liberation.

Back in a devastated Brest, stripped of the family business, they lived through hard years in an attic in Landerneau and then on the rue Victor-Hugo, and witnessed the Ocean Liberty explosion in 1947. They worked as perfumers and then wholesalers before founding the Librairie de la Cite on the rue de Siam. For fifty years the shop was a Brest institution with a reach across Brittany, hosting readings and signings with writers including Martin Gray, Auguste Le Breton, Guy des Cars, Herve Bazin and Pierre-Jakez Helias, whom Pierre Le Bris was the first to publish.

In 1965 Jack Kerouac, in Brittany to trace his Le Bris ancestors, turned up unannounced at the bookshop and befriended the couple. Pierre, ill in bed, received him for a night of conversation over cognac, which Kerouac recounted in Satori in Paris (1966).

Blanche and Pierre Le Bris had two daughters, Jacqueline and Catherine. Pierre died in 2012. Blanche remained in Brest, living at home into great old age and keeping up with her large family of grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. For many years she refused to look at images of the camps to protect herself from the pain, and spoke little about the war until late in life. She celebrated her 100th birthday on 25 September 2020.

Blanche Le Bris died peacefully in Brest on 7 November 2026, aged 106, surrounded by her loved ones. Ouest-France marked her death as the loss of a monument of the city's history and of a hundred years of Brest's story. The cause of death was not made public. Her funeral was held on Thursday 12 November 2026 at the Church of Saint-Louis in Brest.

Through the Librairie de la Cite, Blanche and Pierre Le Bris gave the rebuilt city of Brest one of its main cultural meeting places for half a century. In her final years she became a witness of the Holocaust in Brittany, contributing in June 2022 to the Lycee Jules-Lesven project Sur les traces de la Shoah, which recovered the memory of Brest's deported Jewish families. Her granddaughter Valerie Millet's 2024 biography, Blanche, memoires d'une Brestoise d'adoption, preserves the story of her first fifty years alongside that of the city's reconstruction.