Don't count on Judith Elkan-Hervé, 99, to return to Auschwitz (Poland) to participate in the commemorations of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp, organized with great fanfare on January 27. She will not be alongside Emmanuel Macron, the King of England and a slew of officials. “It’s a cemetery. I don't frequent them for pleasure, even less those that are staged. Too painful,” says the woman who was deported there at the age of 18, in 1944, with her parents. His father died there. With her mother, they returned from hell.
In his subdued living room in Paris, one wall is covered with a library where architecture and history books coexist. On the buffet, African and Indian art. Memories of a photographer husband, Lucien Hervé, who died in 2007. He is no longer there to hear his sweet Franco-Hungarian woman tell “her” Shoah. At our side that day, two schoolgirls from Rosny-sous-Bois (Seine-Saint-Denis). Mouth agape when she describes the gas chambers. “Six million dead,” the near-centenarian reminds them.
