Deported because she was Jewish at the age of 15, in Nazi extermination camps, Esther Senot, 97, tirelessly recounts how far in barbarism and tradiegy, anti-Semitism and racism could have led Man. .
U A hundred third-year students from the Jean-Monnet college in La Loupe and Authon-du-Perche, their teachers and a few elected officials met, Friday afternoon, Esther Senot, former deportee and survivor of Auschwitz during the Second World War.
Charlie Bertel, professor of history and geography at the college of La Loupe, invited him for the 3 e year, to come and tell his tragic story in front of young people aged 13-14. She was their age when her life changed…
A promise made to his sister
His parents were Polish Jews. “We had emigrated to France. We settled in the Belleville district of Paris, a working-class district,” she begins, in front of the assembly gathered in the village hall. For two hours, Esther Senot told her story, which began more than 80 years earlier, at the time of the German occupation. Terrible memories marked by the rise of racism and anti-Semitism, from the creation of the “status of the Jews”, to the wearing of the yellow star until the Vel'd'Hiv' roundup from which she escaped on the 16th and July 17, 1942 but which remains the tragedy of her life: she will never see her parents again.
Arrested and interned in Drancy in July 1943, she was deported in September to German forced labor camps where she witnessed the unleashing of Nazi fanaticism, including the gas chambers…
She is one of the rare survivors to have returned from the Nazi extermination camps of Birkenau and Auschwitz where she was deported between the ages of 15 and 17.
Sick of typhus, she weighed 32 kilos when she was released. Today at 97, Esther Senot continues to honor the promise made to her sister killed like millions of deportees, that of “bearing witness” to the unspeakable horror of Nazi barbarism and the lack of respect for human dignity among the younger generations.
A duty of remembrance necessary at a time of resurgence of nationalism, to illuminate the present and build a world of peace and fraternity.
France
