Jacques Saurel, Jahrgang 1933, hätte ohne weiteres das gleiche Schicksal erleiden können wie zahlreiche Kinder von Eltern, die in der Zwischenkriegszeit aus Polen nach Frankreich ausgewandert waren: Auschwitz und die Gaskammer. Seinem Vater verdankt er es, zunächst nicht behelligt worden zu sein: Dieser hatte sich freiwillig zum Militärdienst verpflichtet, war in Kriegsgefangenschaft geraten und deswegen - wie auch seine Familie - durch die Genfer Konvention geschützt. So wurden Jacques, seine ältere Schwester (die jüngste war versteckt) und sein kleiner Bruder drei Monate lang in Drancy interniert und dann mit ihrer Mutter in das "Sternlager" von Bergen-Belsen deportiert.
Jacques Saurel, nato nel 1933, avrebbe potuto subire il destino riservato a numerosi bambini, figli di genitori ebrei emigrati dalla Polonia tra le due guerre: Auschwitz e la camera a gas. È grazie a suo padre se in un primo momento riesce a sfuggire alla deportazione: arruolato volontario, poi prigioniero di guerra, questi è protetto, così come la sua famiglia, dalla Convenzione di Ginevra. Ma i nazisti cercano degli ostaggi da deportare. Così, nei primi giorni del febbraio 1944, Jacques, la sorella maggiore (la minore è stata nascosta) e il fratellino sono internati per tre mesi a Drancy, per essere poi deportati nel «campo della stella» di Bergen-Belsen con la loro mamma.
Da quel momento è grazie a lei che riescono a sopravvivere. Pur beneficiando di condizioni «privilegiate» poiché i nazisti vogliono servirsi di loro come di «merce di scambio», questi bambini non avrebbero mai potuto resistere senza il sostegno morale e i sacrifici della loro mamma; tanto più che le condizioni di vita, già molto difficili, si deteriorano a partire dall´autunno 1944, man mano che arrivano i sopravvissuti delle evacuazioni dell´Europa dell´ est. Il campo di Bergen-Belsen, la cui organizzazione si sgretola, diventa allora un vero e proprio cimitero dove regnano fame ed epidemie.
For over 25 years, Sarah Lichtsztejn-Montard has tirelessly recounted what she endured during the Second World War, especially to young people. How she and her mother escaped from the Vél' d'Hiv' on the first night after the round-up on July 16th, 1942, and how they were reported in May 1944, thrusting them into the maelstrom of Nazi torment: Drancy, the hell of Auschwitz-Birkenau and, finally, Bergen-Belsen, where they were liberated on April 15th, 1945. Sarah has put her experiences down on paper for those she cares about most, interspersing the account of her life as a wife and mother deeply marked by the Holocaust with the story of her shattered adolescence. This powerful book delivers a universal message of hope and courage.
In this book, Odette Spingarn gives us a first-hand account of the various camps of the «final solution» she passed through after being arrested with her parents in a village in Corrèze, France on 31 March 1944: the Périgueux barracks, Drancy transit camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau extermination camp - where her mother died - one of its sub-camps, Kanada, where she sorted murdered deportees' clothing and, finally, the Zschopau campfactory in Saxony, Germany, to which she was moved in early October 1944.
As the Allies approached in April 1945, she and her fellow slave laborers, all of them women, were packed into boxcars bound for a death camp. Odette took her fate into her hands and jumped out of the train, embarking on a long odyssey that she describes in detail. In the end, a German woman saved her life.
Back in France, Odette's youth and unshakeable optimism enabled her to build a new life, study, have a career and start a family.
Hungary, spring-summer 1944. In less than two months, nearly 440,000 Jews crammed into 147 trains were deported from Hungary to be transported for the great majority to the gates of the Auschwitz-Birkenau's Krematorium. The Brodi family, from Huedin, Transylvania, arrives there on the night of June 1 to 2. Elisabeth is 20 years old, she will never see her family again.
Elisabeth's mourning story plunges us into the modest family life, marked by the attachment to the traditions of her parents, within the Jewish community of a small provincial town in northern Romania. This area at the crossroads of the borders, remodeled in the aftermath of the Great War, is annexed by Hungary in 1940 and its entry into the war worsens the persecutions against the Jews. The Brodi family suffers the effects until the invasion of the country by the Nazis (March 19, 1944) which precipitates them in the Cluj ghetto, the last stage before the deportation.
The memory of her family, her strength of character, her endurance forged in the permanent danger of a terrible year and happy encounters, allow Elisabeth to go through hardships. For her new life, she chooses France and to join the one she loves in Gironde. They met in Gorlitz (Lower Silesia), in a shelter under the Allied bombardments, she, a slave, he, a prisoner of war, exploited by the Nazi war industry. It was in La Teste-de-Buch that they got married, and that Elisabeth built a beautiful and large family (8 children, 17 grandchildren,...) in the form of victory over the annihilation promised by Hitler. She has never ceased passing on the memory of her family and lavishing the lessons of her courage and resilience to the younger generations for a quarter of a century.
Elisabeth Kasza was a nomad in more ways than one. During the war she was deported and sent from one concentration camp to another, then went into exile afterwards. After becoming an actress, she travelled within herself, from character to character. Elisabeth was born in Kaposvár, in southwestern Hungary, into a family of Jewish origin that had converted to Protestantism. Under the Nazi yoke, as Jews she and her parents were confined in a ghetto and later deported. Elisabeth voluntarily shared with them the fate of the 440,000 Hungarian Jews sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau between mid-May and early July 1944. Like most of the deportees, her father was murdered as soon as he arrived. Then Elisabeth was cruelly separated from her mother and transferred to the camps of Bergen-Belsen, Duderstadt and Terezin. After the Liberation, Elisabeth went to Budapest, where she was treated for myocarditis brought on by malnutrition in the camps. Fleeing the communist dictatorship, she wanted to settle in the United States but stayed in France, where she became a stage and screen actress.
Her story is the account of a sensitive, cultivated woman whose happy youth was swept away by torment and horror.
Born in 1933, Jacques Saurel might well have known the fate of so many children of Jewish parents who emigrated from Poland between the wars: Auschwitz and the gas chamber.
He owed it to his father that he initially had no problems with the authorities. As a volunteer for military service and then a prisoner of war, his father protected Jacques and his family under the Geneva Convention. But the Nazis were looking for hostages to deport. Thus, in early February 1944, Jacques, his older sister (the younger one was in hiding) and his little brother were detained with their mother for three months in the Drancy internment camp, before being deported to the "Star Camp", Bergen-Belsen.
It was in turn to their mother that the children owed their survival. If they enjoyed "privileged" conditions because the Nazis wanted to use her as a bargaining chip, these children would never have survived without the moral support and sacrifices of their mother. All the more so because living conditions, already harsh, worsened from the autumn of 1944 with the influx of survivors evacuated from the camps further east. With its organization falling apart, Bergen-Belsen became a veritable death camp riddled with famine and epidemic disease.
Jacques and his family regained their freedom after experiencing in April 1945 the agonies of the refugee "Ghost Train" on which half the 2,000 Jews evacuated from the Star Camp lost their lives. Jacques and his sister were stricken with typhus. They were reunited with their father at Paris´s repatriation centre in the Hotel Lutetia on June 23, 1945.
Although they survived, the same could not be said for other members of the family: no trace of those living in Poland; in France, Jacques lost his paternal grandparents, three uncles, two aunts and six cousins.
From this confrontation with horror at such a young age, escaping he still does not know how, Jacques conceived one great passion: life itself.
Vichy, czerwiec 1944 roku. Francuz i zyd Alex Mayer jest aresztowany przez Gestapo, a nastepnie, 31 lipca 1944 roku, deportowany w ostatnim wielkim transporcie do Auschwitz. Od chwili wyzwolenia obozu calkowicie poswieca sie pisaniu. W pierwszej kolejnosci dla siebie, zeby zrozumiec, zeby nie zapomniec, ale takze dla tych, których juz nie ma i którzy nie moga pozostawic swojego swiadectwa.
Wobec braku papieru zaczyna spisywac dziennik na formularzach administracji obozu. Podejmuje wysilek fizyczny i psychiczny, by opisac odwage i okrucienstwo, szalenstwo, drobne czyny, które niosa ocalenie albo potepienie.
Odnotowuje wydarzenia, odtwarza przebieg podrózy do piekla, od aresztowania po sam koniec (choc wzgledny) koszmaru.
Jego swiadectwo, opublikowane po francusku w 2004 roku i przelozone na hebrajski w 2009 roku, teraz trafia do polskich odbiorców.
Eugène Klein led an extraordinary life, whose many facets he weaves together in this rich and unique account. Eugène grew up destitute in Hungary. He enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I and served in several theaters, including the Carpathian Front, where living conditions were harsh. He found happiness in France during the interwar period. He ran footraces, and his athletic talent allowed him to settle in France and start a family there. As a Jew, Eugène and his family faced persecution by the Nazis: They were arrested in Paris on May 1, 1943 and deported to Auschwitz II-Birkenau in Poland. After surviving forced labor and a «death march», Eugène would be reunited with his wife, but his son would never return.
This dignified account highlights the intelligence and integrity of a man who was both physically and mentally exceptional. With the maturity of age, Eugène combines sincerity with restraint to deliver an account devoid of useless moralizing. Through a series of flashbacks, he demonstrates how his survival in the Nazi camps was certainly due to luck, but also to his prior life experiences, since he had already come face-to-face with humiliation, bitter cold, hunger and mass death, inhumane conditions... and wolves.
