Les Derniers - Henri

Henri
Borlant

Henri Borlant

Henri was born in Paris in 1927, into a large and very modest Russian family. Years earlier, his paternal and maternal grandparents had fled the pogroms raging in Tsarist Russia, where Jews were victims of rape and murder. They arrived in France penniless and without speaking a word of French. At the end of August 1939, when Henri was twelve, the authorities decided to evacuate children from working-class neighborhoods to the French countryside. The family ended up in a village near Angers, where the children attended a Catholic school. Henri was top of his class, including in catechism instruction. He was then baptized and received holy Communion. He admired the priest so much that he considered becoming a priest himself. A few months later, in July 1942, Henri, who felt he more Catholic than Jewish, was deported to Auschwitz, along with his father, his sister Denise and his brother Bernard, who would die very quickly. Henri spent more than two years there, learning all the languages of the camp and eventually being considered an "elder", which earned him the respect of the other prisoners. He was then transferred to Sachsenhausen and Ohdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald, from which he managed to escape. Without realizing it, he played a historic role by alerting American soldiers who were in a nearby village of the existence of the camps. They then saw for themselves the appalling reality. Upon his return to Paris, he was fortunate enough to find his mother, who had managed to hide with her other children, enabling him to resume his life and to study medicine. He married Hella, a German woman and together they have four daughters. After years of silence, the need to speak became more pressing, but it wasn't until the 1990s that he felt he was ready to talk about his past. [...+]

My visit to Henri

Clips

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Henri

« I wanted to be a priest »
See

Henri

« We knew we were going to die soon. That's what we were told all the time. »

Livres

Sophie Nahum
Les derniers
Rencontre avec les survivants des camps de concentration

There are not many left who can bear witness to the concentration camps. Barely a hundred men and women, who were silent for a long time in the face of a post-war France that was reluctant to listen to them. Survivors thanks above all to a succession of chance events, they were able to rebuild their lives with remarkable courage. Sophie Nahum went to meet the “Last Ones”, these extraordinary resilient people, including Ginette Kolinka and Élie Buzyn, for a series of short documentaries, from which results this choral book. Their testimonies echo each other, while revealing the singularity of each destiny. In this way, the last survivors of the Shoah – 75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz – offer us a poignant look at their experiences.

“Touching. These men and women speak from the heart”. Paris Match

“My heart beat for [this] book.” Leila Kaddour.

Sophie Nahum has been making documentaries for over 20 years. After working for the major channels, most notably Arte, she decided to produce her films independently. Young et moi (2015, awarded at FIGRA) was the first, followed by the multi-media project “Les Derniers”, to which she has devoted herself entirely for the past four years.

Photos

Other witnesses