Placek

Léon Placek

Léon Placek, born in 1933, was deported at the age of 10 with his mother and brother Max, first to Drancy and then to Bergen-Belsen. He recalls Drancy as a “waiting room for death,” where he witnessed, among other things, a prisoner’s suicide in front of him. At Bergen-Belsen, he discovered constant hunger, extreme deprivation, and, on his very first night, stumbled upon his first dead body in the camp. During the liberation, as the Germans abandoned the evacuation train, he carried his exhausted mother to a nearby village. She died shortly after. He was then repatriated with his brother to the Hôtel Lutetia, where he reunited with his father after five years of separation. Deeply marked, he remained silent for decades, rebuilt his life in Paris as a certified accountant, and only began to testify in his late eighties.