Jean et Marie

Jean & Marie Vaislic

Jean was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1926. He was thirteen when the German army entered his home town. The following year, when his father was arrested, Jean managed to escape. He hid from farm to farm before being arrested and deported to Auschwitz in 1942. He was 16 years old. Liberated at 20, he was the only survivor of a family that numbered around sixty before the war. For him, returning to Poland was out of the question, as the emptiness that awaited him would lead to suicide. Not knowing where to go, he follows Vincent, a Polish friend he met during the deportation, who has taken him under his wing and whom he considers a brother. They go to Toulouse, where Jean wanders the streets for a while without finding any help. There he also met Marie, another former deportee, who was to become his wife. Marie was arrested at the age of 14, on denunciation, and sent to Ravensbrück in August 1944. She survived the death marches that took her to Bergen-Belsen, which had become a veritable hospital where a typhus epidemic decimated the survivors and from which she narrowly escaped. On her return to Toulouse, she was lucky enough to find her family. Jean couldn't imagine having children; he didn't want anyone to know that he had been deported, or even that he was Jewish. It was out of love for Marie that he finally changed his mind. Together, they had two sons. Until very recently, no one knew that John and Mary were a couple of former deportees. Even today, when Jean recalls his memories, it's "as if someone was shooting at him", he says, pale.