Flora

Flora Eskenazi

Flora was born in Marseille in 1925 to a Greek father and a Turkish mother, both traveling ice-cream vendors. She grew up in a happy family of six children.
In 1939, the family left Marseille for the small town of Barjols, where Flora lived until her father's arrest. He was undeniably turned in as the authorities didn’t know her family was Jewish. By choice, her father had not reported his family to the census authorities and they did not wear the yellow star. Shortly afterwards, the Gestapo returned and arrested Flora's mother and her 15-year-old brother Henri. Flora and her other siblings, also present at the house at the time, managed to hide and were not found.
Unfortunately, Flora was later arrested and deported to Auschwitz on convoy 70. She then ended up in Bergen-Belsen, where she remembers feeling very close to death just before the liberation of the camp.
Her father, her mother, her brother Henri - in all, twenty members of her family - did not come back. Eight months after the end of the war, Flora returned to Marseille, where no one was waiting for her. Attractive and charming, she chose to stay single despite her many suitors. She did eventually meet true love, but unfortunately, he was married. Nevertheless, at 41, she became pregnant. They had a daughter, whom he recognized. When I met Flora, she was funny and irresistible, although she admits that for the past ten years, she has been thinking more often about that dark period of her youth. Talking about it causes her blood pressure to rise sharply. But it’s important for her to talk, and she can’t bear when people tell her it's "ancient history". She also can’t help replying sharply to those who claim that "enough is enough" that for her "it will never be enough" because her life without her mother and her family has been forever altered.