“My grandmother survived Auschwitz and it scares me to hear that people “talk too much about the Shoah””

Testimony – I don’t remember a day when someone told me about my grandmother’s story for the first time. I always knew that she had been deported to Auschwitz, that she had survived by escaping, and she always spoke to me freely about it.

I always knew it, but I never told myself “What a chore, she’s going to talk to me about it again”. On the contrary, when I was little, my grandmother and I had a ritual. We went to a restaurant and his story came in a very happy setting, surrounded by good things to eat.

She always had a very special way, like herself, of talking to me about Nazism: full of life, with joy but without being tongue-tied, without trying to soften or diminish the darkest moments. of its existence. That’s it, the childhood memories I have with her, and the way I learned that I was the granddaughter of a survivor.

A story that I carry in my flesh

As an adult, I became an actress and director. I wanted to talk about my grandmother from my first projects. My first creation was based on recordings of her voice, I then shot a short documentary about her. In interviews for national theater school competitions, when I was asked what I wanted to do, I answered “I want to make a film with my grandmother.” More or less despite myself, it was a subject that never left me.

The first film I directed is called Too much love and he stages it. During the filming, I felt a very strong feeling of obviousness: I carry his legacy, his story, in a way that goes much further than simply having heard his story. It’s in me, in a visceral way. In difficult aspects, in fear, for example. This way of remaining silent, of not saying too loudly that you are Jewish because you never know, while being proud of it. In the more joyful aspects too, because my grandmother always told me that what saved her from Auschwitz was being strong and joyful. This is what allowed her to rebuild herself after the war, and I feel like this strength is part of me too.

Awareness of violence

I know his story by heart, but even having always known, there were moments of violent realization. When I was 14, my cousins ​​and I went to Auschwitz with my grandmother. My father had already been there, but she wanted to take her grandchildren. It was cold, we were all bundled up in ski clothes, but my grandmother refused to wear gloves. She said “I was there barefoot and in pajamas in the snow, I don’t need gloves “. Seeing her there, a survivor, telling us, “here was the wooden board on which I slept, here were the gas chambers” was a very strong and very difficult moment. When we got back, I was sick for two days.

Sometimes, it was also the reactions of others to his words that triggered awareness. While filming the film, she said she saw a pregnant woman giving birth in a camp, and that the Nazis went skeet shooting with her newborn. I knew this story, I knew she was going to tell it. But seeing the reaction of the actor who listened to it had an effect on me that was difficult to explain. As if the full extent of inhumanity, of horror, hit me at once.

How to keep this memory alive

In France and elsewhere, the rise of anti-Semitism scares me. I wonder where my children can be safe, although I had never asked myself this question until now. Where will they be able to have a Jewish name in peace, where will they be able to say ” I am Jewish ” without fear.

Lately, we have heard people who are Holocaust deniers or anti-Semitics – I’m not sure how to qualify them – say: “We have talked enough about the Shoah, while we never talk about this or that”. As if we could put stories on a scale and say “ Is the Holocaust more important? ». Every cause deserves to be addressed, and it scares me to hear “ We talked about it a lot, let’s move on”.

When the deportees returned after the war, no one wanted to listen to them. Twenty years later, when we decided to hear them, my grandmother needed to speak. There was something cathartic for her in going to talk about her deportation, in schools, in interviews, in her book. But she never imposed this duty of memory on us. When the time came for my film, I had the feeling of taking back the torch.

Now that this film exists, I feel enormous relief knowing that there is a record of what she passed on to me. I know that I too will pass this story on to my children, without telling myself that we must talk about it at all costs. She’s part of me, anyway. Those around me inherit it by being around me, and my children will know it, as they will know what it is to be Jewish, as they will know that my name is Frankie. We must never stop passing it on. With each generation, there will be a thousand new ways to do it.

This testimony was collected and edited by Aïda Djoupa. Do you have a story to tell? Write to us at [email protected]

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