As Tal Bruttmann explains, one of the rare French historians to work on the Shoah, it was not until the late 1970s that we put ourselves listening to the accounts of the survivors of the camps.
In 2025 there was special attention paid to the last survivors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. However, it took years to really hear their testimonies …
The survivors testified very early, at the end of the war, as Simone Veil told it. A first wave of testimonies was published in 1945 and conference tours was organized. But it comes up against a wall of silence. Public opinion does not want to listen to them at that time, does not want to hear what they had experienced during the war. For obvious reasons, a memory was formed in the Jewish community and remained confined to it. It was not until the end of the 1970s and the early 1980s, the trial of Klaus Barbie and a wave of negationist declarations like those of Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, the former commissioner general with Jewish questions during the occupation, who declares in 1978 than Auschwitz “We had only gassed the lice”, So that the testimonies of the survivors are mobilized against this negationism.
Do you deplore that the history of Auschwitz is little treated in France?
-The story of Auschwitz has also written very early. The first book appeared in 1946 in Czechoslovakia. It is called Tovarna na s
France
