Évelyne Haguenauer, daughter and granddaughter of deportees, “I was raised in the duty of memory”

80 years after the release of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Lyon there are no more direct witnesses of the deportation. The descendants of those who survived, like Evelyne Haguenauer, speak. As a mission to be the voice of those who have disappeared.

“I am very moved to talk about my family story”

Evelyne Haguenauer, granddaughter of deportees

Évelyne Haguenauer had never returned to 25 rue de la Ruche in the 3rd arrondissement of Lyon in front of this house where her paternal grandparents lived during the Second World War. In this small quiet street in the Montchat district, Live far from the looks his grandfather Hermann, his grandmother Rosa and their son Claude.

“Dad had been arrested a few days before. And then they came to get my grandfather here. My grandmother was out at that time. And when she saw the Gestapo car, she left and escaped arrest. ”

It was in June 1944. Father and son were taken to Montluc prison and then transported to the Drancy Transit camp before being embarked on the cattle wagons to Auschwitz. Only one photo testifies to the departure of Jewish families from the region from Lyon Perrache station.

“My grandfather Hermann who had been amputated with an arm because of an illness, was immediately gassed. And dad because of his youth, survived this horror”says Evelyne.

Two years earlier on August 24, 1942, the maternal grandparents of Evelyne, Arthur and Minna had also been deported to Auschwitz. Minna was murdered there. Their children, Anne-Laure, Evelyne’s mother, and her brother Oscar had been hidden.

In Evelyne’s family, among the survivors, there are those who have been silent. Like his father Claude, who “told his friends but especially not to his children”. A man with the now unspeakable past who wanted above all to invent a life. And place this last name at the highest after having had the worst experience of dehumanization.

“When my parents got married, my father built a professional life. He created his own business as a plumber. His greatest happiness was to take us on Sunday by car going around the sites where we saw the “Hagenauer et Cie” sign.

Claude Hagenhauer will not even be called upon to testify at the Barbie trial: he died 18 months earlier in November 1985.

And then there is Arthur the maternal grandfather who, a few weeks after his return, in July 1945, wrote a story, testifying to everything he had experienced. “It’s the original, caught in the machine”, shows us Evelyne Haguenauer in a binder. “He hit him in German since my grandparents were German Jews. I have 80 pages in German telling all his story. ”

A story that was published in 2015 in Hebrew and English in 2015 but only in Israel.

With this double family story to wear, Evelyne Haguenauer has always been committed. First in politics, elected to the city of Lyon under the mandate of Gérard Collomb. Also engaged with memory associations.

“I was raised in the duty of memory. It seems normal to me that it is me who now transmitted this story. In any case to all the people who want to listen to me.

Evelyne Haguanauer will be present on Sunday January 25 at the inauguration of the Shoah Memorial.

Because the capital of the Resistance, where many Jews had taken refuge, had not so far had a real place of commemoration. According to historians 6100 Jews from the region were killed.

A project of a whole life that will not see two survivors who fought to obtain it: Benjamin Orenstein, ex-president of the Association of the former deportees of Auschwitz-Birkenau, died on February 10, 2021 and Claude Bloch, tireless Witness of the Shoah died on December 31, 2023.