"Décrire avant qu'on oublie": le témoignage d'une survivante de la Shoah

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"Je ne savais pas que j'étais juive, c'est la guerre qui me l'a appris": à 93 ans, Marie Vaislic-Rafalovitch, rescapée de la Shoah, a voulu écrire sur cette "terreur pure" parce qu'"Il n'y aura bientôt plus personne", comme s'intitule son livre. - L'info en continu  https://buzzplus.fr/ Infos, news & actualités - L'information internationale en direct.

Transcript

00:00 "I didn't know I was Jewish, it was the war that taught me that,"

00:03 at 93, Marie Vesely Grafalowicz, a survivor of the Shoah,

00:07 wanted to write about this pure terror because "soon there will be no one left,"

00:11 as her book is titled.

00:12 Sitting in a chair in her apartment in Toulouse,

00:16 she tells the AFP how, as a teenager, she was deported alone,

00:20 without her parents, to the concentration camp in Ravensbruck,

00:23 in northern Berlin, then to Bergen-Belsen, in Germany.

00:27 To write her book, published in January, she did not hesitate to confront

00:31 the memories of the horrors and traumas she survived,

00:34 in order to try to describe them, before everything was swept away.

00:37 Ms. Grafalowicz was called upon by a militiaman on 24 July 1944,

00:42 in Saint Catherine Street, Toulouse.

00:44 Marie was only 14 years old.

00:46 She came to pick up some things in the family apartment

00:50 before returning to the farm in Tarn-et-Garonne, where she lived with her parents,

00:53 refugees there since the beginning of the war because they were Polish Jews.

00:57 "A swept-away childhood.

00:58 It was enough for a simple 'plus-oui-plus' to end my childhood there."

01:02 Taken by the militia, she sees a silhouette at a window,

01:06 the neighbor of the neighborhood, who saw her grow up and play with marbles,

01:10 denouncing her.

01:11 "Plus-Juive-plus, I had heard the word, of course.

01:14 But he didn't want to say anything for me, until I was arrested," she writes.

01:20 "I wasn't aware of what the war was, I was living my teenage life,"

01:24 she adds, with a voice sometimes broken by emotion.

01:27 She was deported when the Allies landed in Normandy,

01:31 as the end of the conflict was drawing near.

01:32 In the car, no one believes in deportation.

01:36 But the unbearable journey continues.

01:38 After a week, the train stops in Germany.

01:42 "For the first time, I experienced pure terror," she writes.

01:47 In Ravensbruck, a women's concentration camp,

01:50 her eyes of a child discover the flanked bodies, the shaved heads.

01:54 She sees a baby dying of hunger, then her mother of despair.

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