What will we do when there are no more witnesses? Because time passes, and the last survivors disappear, the question becomes nagging at the start of this year, eighty years after the discovery of the Nazi extermination and concentration camps. To continue writing history, we need testimonies, traces, archives. “It’s our mission to collect them,” recalls Karen Taïeb, head of the archives of the Shoah Memorial, museum and documentation center. At almost 78 years old, Roger Fajnzylberg took the plunge last week, bequeathing the documents left by his father, Alter, who died in 1987, who belonged to the hundred survivors of the “Sonderkommandos” of Auschwitz.
Employed to “process” bodies in gas chambers and crematoria, direct witnesses to the industrialized extermination of European Jews, they were regularly eliminated by the SS. “My father was a political activist. I think that’s where he found the strength to survive, through the need to bear witness to the atrocities he experienced and saw. analyzes Roger Fajnzylberg. After the war, Alter, deported by the first train from France to Auschwitz on March 27, 1942, blackened five notebooks, deposited at the Shoah Memorial, as did his repatriate card and the report of his hearing, on October 20, 1945, by the Enemy War Crimes Research Service.
Testimonies left in a shoebox
“In a family, the process is
