the survivor of the death camps, Jean Vaislic, died at the age of 95
Jean Vaislic died at over 95 years old. This survivor, deported from the Auschwitz killing center, testified to his story alongside his wife Marie, herself deported. Jean Vaislic was the only survivor of his family.
In September 1939, Jean Vaislic was 13 years old. He lives in Lodz, Poland. The Nazis invade his country, his city. From the start of the school year in 1939, they burst into his school and force the students to burn the tables and chairs. The children understand that there will be no more school
With his family, Jean is forced to leave his home and crowd in with thousands of other Jews in the Lodz ghetto. During an exit from the ghetto with his father in 1940, he was arrested. He will never see him again, like any member of his family.
The teenager finds himself on the run, from farm to farm. He is alone. He must flee as soon as the peasant has no more to feed him. He wanders around trying to survive. He was arrested in 1942 and imprisoned. A few months later, he was transferred to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.
Jean Vaislic recounted the comment he had been saved from the death camp thanks to a fellow baker who worked for the SS of the camp: Wacek. This companion in misfortune, also Polish who was not Jewish but Catholic, managed to give him a little bit of bread every day, which he hid in his boots..
Without him, Jean Vaislic explained that during these years he would not have been able to survive the hell of the camps, the hunger, the despair, the forced labor Kommandos and the “death marches”. The only survivor of the sixty members of his family, Jean follows Wocek to Toulouse after the war. There he met Marie, also a Holocaust survivor. Living in Toulouse, she had been denounced by neighbors.
Marie and Jean Vaslic get married and start a family. Jean Vaislic does not understand how and why he had to the death of his parents and that of his brothers and sister. Aware of being among the last survivors of the killing centers, both have tirelessly testified until last year with teenagers in middle and high schools and in many places such as the Resistance Museum in Toulouse .
“Jean, it was an extraordinary meeting, confides his friend Pierre Lasry, author of his biography “From the bottom of my memory” published in 2017. The word is seen and seen again, but that’s what we hear from most people who have come across it. He was a small fellow by the size but of exceptional humanity, poetry and humor “.
“He always testified to what he had lived, even if it was very difficult for him to look back on that time. He had terrible nightmares about it. But he did it with a lot of courage, delicacy and subtlety so that we have always lived, we were caught with him in the nightmare he lived “.
“What I keep is this kind of faith in him, pegged to the body, continues Jean Lasry. He always got out of it, always in extremis. It is also this wonderful sense of friendship and this humanity. I often accompanied him and Marie when they testified. And I remember a kid who asked, “but what are you doing?”. He started to answer him by saying “you know my darling …” And he took human horror upon himself to make it something presentable to a child with so much tenderness and love … “.
His passing is a heartbreaking loss to his friends and beyond. One of her relatives, MP Sandrine Mörch writes: “it is all the more sad that each of us, intimate or distant companion of Jean, gradually becomes aware of the immense loss that this represents for History. Like a growing desert in our collective memory “.
“By losing Jean, we lose an incredible moral and historical relay. Who will now brandish his tattoo printed on the arm to answer our questions? How many young people have changed their gaze at the sight of this single number, 8580, the living embodiment of anti-Semitic persecution? “. The funeral of Jean Vaislic will take place this Monday January 10 at 2:30 p.m. in Muret.