Rafle du 10 janvier 1944 : Boris Cyrulnik sur les traces de son traumatisme à la synagogue de Bordeaux
It is one of the few survivors of the Bordeaux synagogue roundup where 335 Jews – including 50 children – were arrested by French police and German soldiers, imprisoned in the place of worship and deported to Drancy, then to Auschwitz. This Tuesday evening, the famous neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik attended for the first time at the commemoration tribute to the victims of this roundup perpetrated on the night of January 10 to 11, 1944. Seventy-nine years later, the emotion was still strong for him. “In my memory, I was not afraid, but it is not possible. What is in my memory is the arrest, the escape and the Righteous.”
On the morning of January 11, the great synagogue of Bordeaux, transformed into a prison, was “occupied by armed men, there was barbed wire” remembers the one who only had 6 and a half years old at the time. In Gironde, 228 Jews were arrested by French police and German soldiers. Other arrests had taken place in Pau and Bayonne. Almost all of them were deported to Drancy and Auschwitz. Boris Cyrulnik, he managed to climb under the ceiling of the synagogue toilets and escape the Gestapo. When he found himself alone in the street, he was saved by a nurse from the Red Cross, Andrée Descoubès.
A trauma at the origin of his work on resilience
The neuropsychiatrist explains that this traumatic experience is at the origin of all his work on the concept of resilience. It took forty years before he could set foot in Bordeaux again in 1985. This Tuesday evening, on entering the synagogue, he confided: “The starting point is this synagogue. But when I was there, it was not a synagogue, it was a prison. It became a synagogue when peace came. And the fact that being beautiful is very important because it erases the horror of war. Beauty erases the horror of war.”
When speaking to the Bordeaux Jewish community to pay homage to him, Boris Cyrulnik insisted on the importance of carrying out the duty of memory and the work of individual resilience. But also on the strength of resistance that the Jews showed during the Second World War. In 1942, the little boy, of a Ukrainian father and a Polish mother, lived in Bordeaux, between the St-Michel and St-Pierre districts with his parents, until he was public assistance academy. His father had joined the Resistance and his parents were anxious to protect him from the Nazis. This Wednesday, Boris Cyrulnik will receive a medal from the City of Bordeaux.
After this terrible night of June 10 to 11, 1944, Boris Cyrulnik remained in Gironde until the end of the war, hidden by the Righteous. His parents were deported to Auschwitz where they both died.
Boris Cyrulnik will be the exceptional guest of France Bleu Gironde live, this Thursday, January 12, from 7:45 a.m.