TESTIMONIALS. 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, the last survivors of the Shoah tell the unspeakable

This Monday, we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. On this occasion, we heard from four survivors of the death camps: Judith Elkan Hervé, Yvette Lévy, Ginette Kolinka and Esther Senot. Final witnesses, today, of the Nazi horror.

For almost fifty years, Yvette Lévy, Judith Elkan Hervé, Ginette Kolinka and Esther Senot walled themselves in silence. For fear of being misunderstood. For fear that no one would believe their story.

80 years after the liberation of the Polish concentration and extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau by Russian troops, the memory of the horror is still intact for these four survivors of the death camps. These women testify wherever we want to hear them and especially in schools, colleges and high schools. It is precisely to this youth that Esther Senot, aged 97, addresses today in a moving letter, read at the Shoah Memorial.

I am counting on you so that when we are no longer here, we who knew the camps and can certify that they really existed.

“I repeat, do not let yourself be led down the path of racism and xenophobia, that is to say, hatred of foreigners. It leads to the most horrible crimes. Accept to be different from each other.”

Esther Senot was born on January 15, 1928 in Poland. She is the sixth of seven children. To escape the Polish pogroms, the family arrived in France in the 1930s and settled in Paris in the disadvantaged district of Belleville, because rents were cheap. The family of eight lives in a hovel surrounded by sewing machines for work. Esther Senot will be the only one to return from the death camps.

She will spend two winters in this same death camp, 17 months in extreme conditions. She will see her sister gradually weaken and then die.

You promise me that if you have the chance to come back and tell what happened here, that we won't be forgotten by history.

Another survivor of the camps, Judith Elkan Hervé. She was born in Transylvania. In May 1944, she was arrested and then deported with her family. She is 18 years old. She remembers the children taken to the gas chamber. “For me, Auschwitz is that, mothers who bring their children to death.”

Out of 1300 people, 896 went directly to the gas chamber.

At this time, the young Yvette Lévy was a member of the Jewish scouts of France. With her group, she hides children who escaped from the Vel-d'Hiv roundup. In July 1944, the children and Judith were arrested, headed to the Drancy camp, before all being deported by convoy 77.As soon as we got off the train, we were all taken off. Straight away, it's the selection, the men on one side, the women on the other. Out of 1300 people, 896 went directly to the gas chamber.”

March 13, 1944, Ginette Kolinka was 19 when she was arrested with her father, her younger brother and her 14-year-old nephew. A month later, they were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Ginette Kolinka remembers the Kapos in the camp: “I don'tai Never vu of people Also nasty. They don't thought that one chose : it was of We hit, We hit. “When it is said that you were hit, I see the Kapo who hits the victim until he is on the ground and when he is on the ground and very bloody, she continues to hit him. This is the hood.”

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Norbert Cohen/ Wilfried Redonnet

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Yvette Lévy, Judith Elkan Hervé, Ginette Kolinka and Esther Senot kept silent for a very long time and then the obligation to remember was imposed on them as a matter of course.

Auschwitz-Birkenau is the symbol of the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany which resulted in the death of six million Jews, including around a million in this camp between 1940 and 1945.