‘No one but Jews lost their apartments’: how homes taken by Nazis in wartime Paris were never given back

Hélène and Israël Malowanczyk on the balcony of their apartment in Paris’s 11th arrondissement in 1935. Photograph: Mémorial de la Shoah/Coll. Renée Rebecca Malowanczyk

The 1935 photograph shows Israël and Hélène Malowanczyk standing on the balcony of their second-floor apartment at 118 Avenue Parmentier in Paris’s 11th arrondissement.

The couple – he a hatmaker from Poland, she a French dressmaker – are smiling. Like almost all Parisians at the time, they rented their home, a two-room flat where they lived with their two young daughters.