Help us continue to collect and spread as widely as possible the precious words of the last Holocaust survivors.



Close
My visit to

Guiroa

« I waited for them for 30 years, but the truth is, even today I miss my parents. »

Guiroa Markowitch

Guiroa was born in 1933 to an upper-middle-class Polish Jewish family. They were proud of their "French son" and convinced that neither France nor Germany would harm them. However, his father, a cavalry officer, was arrested in May 1941 during the Billet Vert roundup and deported to Pithiviers and then Auschwitz. On July 16, 1942, Guiroa was asleep in his room when the police came to take his mother to the Vél' d'Hiv. Alone in Paris, he took a random train and found himself hidden by Spanish anarchists, for whom he carried out small resistance missions. At the age of ten, he felt like the hero of one of his favorite adventure novels.
After the war, he returned to Paris to look for his parents. Little by little, he realized that they had both been deported. Nevertheless, it will take him more than thirty years to accept the fact that they were never coming back. Mechanically inclined, he taught himself to repair machines, later becoming an excellent electronics engineer, specializing in miniaturization. He also spent several years on a kibbutz in Israel, where he became a shepherd and met his wife, who gave him a new lease on life.



More info on Guiroa Markowitch