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

Extraits

See

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. »

Photos

Les soeurs d'Henri
Les parents d'Henri

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