Denise Holsteinone of the last survivors of Auschwitz, died on Saturday November 16 at the age of 97 in Antibes (Alpes-Maritimes).
A native of Rouen (Seine-Maritime), she was arrested with her family, like all people of the Jewish faith in the city, in January 1943. While the rest of her family was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, she was held at the Drancy internment camp (Seine-Saint-Denis) – the antechamber of the extermination camps – then sent to the Louveciennes hospital (Yvelines) to take care of nine entering children.
Denise Holstein was then transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where both her parents died, before Bergen-Belsen. She was liberated in April 1945 by the British army. “I was lying covered in lice, it was terriblebut when we heard the bombings, I managed to go to the Allied soldiers who were arriving,” she told Le Parisien in January 2022.
Duty to transmit
Encouraged by Serge Klarsfeld, Denise Holstein began to tell her story in schools in 1993 and will continue her work of memory.
In 2020, in an interview with Le Point, she said she became aware poor knowledge by part of the population of the Shoah. “For years, we didn't talk about it, and few people, ultimately, spoke up to testify. National Education didn't do its job. The teachers who heard me in the classes I “I visited, from the beginning of the 1990s, were suffocated by what I was saying. It's a good thing we hadn't taught them.”
Since the announcement of his death, tributes have multiplied on X (formerly Twitter). The mayor of Rouen, Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, greeted “a great lady of Rouen”.
“A survivor of the death camps, this fragile woman with a strong character has spent her entire life witnessing and passing on the memory of the deportees,” wrote the mayor of Antibes, Jean Leonetti.
Pour Renaud Muselierpresident of the PACA regional council, Denise Holstein “brought to life around her this essential, vital duty of memory”.
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