Esther Senot
Born in Poland in 1928, Esther grew up in the Belleville neighborhood of Paris, where her parents moved to in 1930. She lived happily with her six brothers and sisters, until everything changed on July 16, 1942, the day of the Vel’ d'Hiv round-up. At her mother’s request, Esther went to see what was going on in the neighborhood. Because she wasn’t home at the time, she avoided getting arrested. But when she returned to her house, she found the apartment empty and the door sealed. Alone in Paris at the age of 14, with nothing but a little summer dress on her back, she was first taken in by her uncle's building attendant before finding refuge with one of her brothers in Pau (southwest of France). She eventually returned to Paris in the hope of finding her parents. But she was in turn arrested and taken to Auschwitz in a particularly dreadful convoy made up of old people arrested at a retirement home and women with their newborn babies. Esther is one of the few deportees I've met who lasted two winters in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Upon her return, like most Jewish survivors, she found herself in Paris, at the Hotel Lutetia, which served as an assembly point, but no one came to pick her up. She returned to Belleville to see what had become of her family's apartment, which she was told she could get back, if she paid back all the unpaid rent. Totally destitute, she found no help anywhere; she even had the feeling of "disturbing" a country determined to live again. On the rare occasions she would try to talk about what she had endured; she would feel people didn’t believe her. So, she would keep quiet. She tried to take her own life but she survived and, a few months later, met the man who was to become her husband. Together, they have three children, six grandchildren and as many great-grandchildren. The young girl who became an orphan at the age of 14 took revenge on life with her family.
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