Joseph

Joseph Weisman

Joseph was born in 1931 into a very modest Polish family. He grew up in the Abbesses district, where there were no Jews. On July 16, 1942, Joseph, his two sisters and their parents were arrested and taken to the Vél' d'Hiv, then to Beaune-la-Rolande. On the day he and his family were to be deported, he and dozens of other children were taken from the ranks and torn away from their parents with unseen violence. It was the last time he saw his father, mother and sisters. Left alone in the camp, he was convinced that death awaited them, so he decided to escape with another boy named Joseph. It took the two of them many long hours to cross an intricate network of barbed wire. He returned to Paris where he was wanted by the police. He finally ended up in the countryside where he stayed in a boarding school until the end of the war. When he returned to Paris, he found no one from his family. Neither his parents nor his two sisters had returned. The story he told in his book Après la Rafle inspired the film La Rafle.