It was January 27, 1945. Red Army soldiers entered the Auschwitz camp, a symbol of Nazi barbarism where more than a million Jews were killed. Ginette Kolinka was deported there in the spring of 1944 at the age of 19 with her father, brother and nephew. She alone returned in 1945.
This Monday, January 27, 2025, 80 years to the day after the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau campGinette Kolinka testifies in RTL Midi on RTL, a few days before his hundredth birthday. “I learn about liberation when I’m sick,” she says. “The first thing I think about is having my number removed because I want to forget all these bad times. As I was very sick, I thought that I would have undergone an operation. I saw myself on the surgeon’s bed saying to this gentleman: ‘While you are there, while I am asleep, take off my number. It did not happen like that and the. number, it’s still there.”
Two friends from Ginette Kolinka also testified to the hell of the camps, two women who were deported in the same convoy as her in 1944: Simone Veil and Marceline Loridan-Ivens. But Ginette Kolinka admits: it is not to think of her comrades that she always carries her message with such vigor
I can’t believe Hitler’s anti-Semitism.
Ginette Kolinka in RTL Midi
“My obsession,” she explains, “is to tell those who listen to me that everything that happened, all that, happened because someone called Hitler hated the Jews. Hate… Do you see where this is going? And that’s why I talk to young people, to warn them that it’s hatred that caused all this.
In January 2025, France faced a new outbreak of anti-Semitism: swastikas were discovered on the synagogue of Rouen a few days ago, stars of David on houses in Vincennes. “I believe in it because people talk to me about it,” says Ginette Kolinka, “but I don’t think it’s very serious. I think they’re young people having fun without knowing exactly what they’re doing.”
-“I am Jewish, it’s true,” she continues. “I am, I am very strongly when in front of me, we are stupidly attacked for stupid things. Jews, we are simply a human being and we could have been Muslim, we could have been Christian, but we are in a Jewish family and we are Jewish, that’s it. But I talk like that because I’m not religious. So, if someone attacks me, if they don’t like me, I don’t say it’s because I’m Jewish. I can’t believe Hitler’s anti-Semitism. That doesn’t worry me. Maybe I’m wrong! I’m not afraid of this anti-Semitism at the moment.”
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