Toulouse: the testimony of Lili Leignel, deported at the age of 11, in front of the high school students of Pierre de Fermat
The Pierre de Fermat high school in Toulouse welcomed, Monday, February 14, Lili Leignel, a former deportee now aged 90 who continues to describe the horror of deportation and Nazi barbarism in front of middle and high school students. Interview.
Have you been meeting college and high school students for forty years to talk to them about the horror of the Shoah and Nazi barbarism?
You know, I have the peach. My mission is to meet young people, high school students, college students and even children to explain these horrors of war so that it can never come back again. However, this does not take the path of it, because we see the evil everywhere at the present time. But despite everything, I want to talk to them about these horrors, but also about the racism that exists in our time: the anti-Semitism that still persists, after 6 million dead Jews. Anti-Semitism and xenophobia, hatred of foreigners. This is why I intervene with young people so that they fight hatred. With hatred can only be born war.
Are you shocked, precisely, by the speech distilled by the far-right candidates in the presidential election?
It is certain and it is even more dangerous in our time. I don’t want to play politics with young people, but I tell them: you are high school students and you will soon be old enough to vote and you will have to be very careful about the ballot that you slip into the ballot box, because it will be heavy with sense. But you know, young people understand and I trust them.
so many years that you intervened in schools to tell your story of a child deported at the age of 11, do you feel that it was of any use?
I’m sure it’s positive. I get huge letters from students, thousands over the time I’ve testified. All prove to me how determined young people are to take up the torch. How many years do I still have left? Fortunately, we do not know, but I know that after my departure the young people will take over. It’s something that made me stronger.
The risk of forgetting the Shoah, after the disappearance of all the survivors, is this also a message that you passed on to your audience?
I wish it with all my heart. I won’t be here to see it, but I believe in it. I am an optimist, given the letters I receive from students, I can afford to believe it. They all look determined, very serious. It is by always speaking that we can avoid evil again.
When did you start testifying in front of young people?
It was at the time of the rise of Holocaust deniers, late 1970s, early 1980s. So more than forty years. At first it wasn’t at this pace, but now with endless demands, even as I get older, I don’t hesitate to move very far, because I live in Lille (North). For two days, I am in Toulouse to testify in high school and Fermat college, then I return very quickly to the North where I have to go to Belgium. I also testified in Germany. I realize that young people all over Europe have become aware of the past tragedy.
How can the horror of Nazi barbarism be conveyed to students today?
They cannot understand. They wonder how human beings could do such horrors to other humans. They are horrified to see what inhumanity there was in the concentration camps where I was deported at the age of 11 in Germany. That of Ravensbrück, a women’s camp, and finally in Bergen-Belsen where there was an epidemic of typhus.
Story of a life…
Lili Leignel, born Keller-Rosenberg in Croix (Nord) in 1932, aged 90, came to testify at the Pierre de Fermat high school and college in Toulouse. For 40 years, it has borne witness to the horror of deportation and Nazi barbarism in schools in France and abroad. Lili Leignel was 11 years old when she was arrested on October 27, 1943, in Lille with her two little brothers. She was deported to Germany to Ravensbrück then to Bergen-Belsen before being released in April 1945 with her mother infected with typhus. His father was assassinated at the Buchenwald concentration camp (Germany). In Toulouse, she was invited by the Fermat high school life council. In April 2021, she published “And we came back alone” (Ed. Plon).