Paris – While France is preparing for marking the 80th anniversary of the Nazi venture to Allied forces, survivors of the Second World War reflect on painful memories of fear, deprivation and persecution formed by the German occupation of the country and the deportation of Jews and others to the dead camps.
In May 1940, Nazi troops wipe through France. Among those who were caught in the chaos, the 15-year-old Geneviève Perrier, who fled her village in northeastern France to escape from the advancing German troops such as millions of others. France had surrendered in June.
Three years later, Esther Senot, 15, was arrested by the French police and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In 1944 the 19-year-old Ginette Kolinka was sent to the same skull.
Now almost 100 years old, the women continue to share their stories, determined to keep the memory of the war alive and to pass on her lessons to future generations.
“We were scared,” Perrier remembered when she described on the bike with her mother by bike on the bike and only wore a small travel bag, while her uncle grabbed a horse cart on the roads of East France.
“There were many people on the run, with children in baby carriages everyone ran away. There was a column of civilians who flee and a column of French soldiers flee,” she said.
Perrier and others hid in a field when they heard bomber aircraft. “Mother had a white hat. Some told her: ‘Remove your hat! “And then I saw a huge bomb passing over our heads.
Perrier later found a train and found refuge for a few months in a small town in the southwest of France, in an area controlled by the Collaborist Vichy regime, before her mother decided they would go back home -just to live under hard Nazi occupation.
“The resistance was great in our area,” Perrier said, adding that she was willing to join the so -called French troops of the interior (FFI). Three women from the FFI were taken prisoner and tortured by the Nazis just a few kilometers away from her house, she remembered.
“My mother kept saying,” No, I don’t want you to leave. I don’t have a man anymore, so if you go … “she said. “She was right because they were all killed.”
Yet Perrier kept her spirit of resistance in her daily life.
“In the church there was a Catholic hymn,” she said, sang, “Catholic and French, always!”
“We roared it with all our power, hoping that they would hear (the Nazi soldiers),” she said.
When the Allied forces Landed on Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944Perrier said she didn’t have much access to news and it couldn’t believe it.
Later that year she saw the troops of the 2nd French division of General Leclerc, equipped with American tanks, enter her village. “They freed us and there was a tank that almost stopped at our door. So of course I went to the tank. And then they didn’t keep a ball far away,” she said.
Towards the end of the war, French men brought a German soldier that they accused of killing a baby to the cemetery of the village. “They let him dig his grave. They put him in … They killed him,” she said.
Born in Poland from a Jewish family who emigrated to France at the end of the 1930s, Esther Senot 15 was arrested by the French police in Paris. She was deported in September 1943 to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp with Veetrein. In the slope, the Nazis selected those they could use as forced workers.
“A German with his speaker said: the elderly, women, children, those who are tired can come to the trucks,” she remembered. “Of the 1,000 people we were, 650 came on the trucks … and 106 of us, women, were selected to return to work in the camp for forced labor.” Others were gasted to death shortly after their arrival.
Senot survived for 17 months in Auschwitz-Birkenau and other camps and returned to France at the age of 17.
In the spring of 1945, the Lutetia Hotel in Paris became a gathering place for those who returned from the concentration camps. Senot described the crowd of people who were looking for missing relatives, some brought photos of their loved ones, while walls were covered with posters with the names of survivors.
“It was bureaucratic,” Senot said. “At the first counter they gave us temporary identity cards. Then they gave us a fairly basic medical examination … and those who were lucky to find their families, they went to an office where they received some money and were told:” Now you have completed the formalities … you go home. “”
Seventeen members of the Senot family were killed by the Nazis during the Second World War, including her mother, her father and six brothers and sisters.
In a recent commemoration for the hotel, Senot said that she had hoped that her survival would “witness the absolute crime in which we were caught.” But once back in France, she felt the most difficult thing that was the indifference for the fate of those who were deported.
“France was liberated for a year and people did not expect that we would return with all the misery in the world on our shoulders,” she said.
A small crowd looked at her in her former Parisian neighborhood. “I weighed 32 kilos (70 pounds) when I returned, my hair was shaved. A year after the liberation, people had not met any woman who looked like this.”
Senot said when she started explaining what happened to her: “You could see disbelief in their eyes.” “And suddenly they got angry. They said, ‘But you have gone crazy, you talk nonsense, it could not have happened. “And I will always remember the face of a man who looked at me and said,” You came back in such small numbers, what did you do to come back and not the others? ” ‘
Kolinka, who was 19 when she was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in April 1944, is known in France for sharing its lively memories of the concentration camps with the younger generation in the past two decades.
In June 1945, when she returned to Paris, she only weighed 26 kilos (57 pounds) and was very weak. Yet, compared to some others, she felt “happy” to find her mother and four sisters in France when they came back home. Her father, a brother and a sister died in death camps.
She didn’t talk about the war for more than half a century. “Those who have told their story, it is true that it seemed incredible (at the time),” she said.
Six million European Jews and people from other minorities were killed by the Nazis and their employees during the Holocaust.
In the 2000s, Kolinka joined an association of surviving deportees and began to speak out.
“What we have to keep in mind is that everything that happened was because a man (Adolf Hitler) hated the Jews,” she said.
“Hate, for me, is dangerous,” she added. “As soon as we say: that is, it is, it proves that we make a difference when in reality, regardless of whether we are Jews, Muslims, Christians, blacks, we humans are.”
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AP journalists Nicolas Garriga and Patrick Hermansen have contributed to the story.
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