Did This Jam Company Really Save People During The Holocaust?

There's been a story circulating online across social media platforms like TikTok and Facebook, though it actually started on Twitter (via New York Post). It's about a man who helped an elderly woman who couldn't reach the Bonne Maman jam she wanted at the grocery store. She explained to him that she always buys that brand of jam because the family behind the company saved her family during World War II in Paris. She added that she too was a Holocaust survivor. The man who helped her, Michael Perino, then shared the encounter on Twitter.

But there are some calling the story into question and wondering if it is really true (via Daily Dot). As it turns out, someone along the way pointed out that Bonne Maman as a brand was not created until the 1971 and that Andros, the manufacturing company, didn't exist until 1959 (via Snopes). While Bonne Maman has said that they won't comment on personal matters such as this story, it's entirely possible that this is a real story when the history is traced further back.

This is why it could be true

There was even another Holocaust survivor, Eric Mayer, who told the Jewish Standard that he escaped a German city, Worms, and found his way to the village where Bonne Maman's founders lived at the time (via Snopes). At the time, the village, Biars-sur-Cère, had a tiny population of fewer than 800 people. That was where Suzanne Chapoulart along with her family lived. She ended up marrying Jean Gervoson shortly after World War II ended. He and her brother, Pierre Chapoulart, soon became business parters who packaged and sold the leftover jams of the Chapoulart father's fruit and nut business. The Chapoulart family's fruit and nut business had been around since the 1910s.

So it is actually entirely plausible that the family could have aided Holocaust survivors or those fleeing from the Nazis during World War II. Whether it was in their little village as Mayer reported or in Paris as the woman from the grocery store stated, their stories are completely possible. Even with the distance between their small village and Paris, the existing fruit and nut business could have sent the Chapoulart family to the capital.