International Holocaust Remembrance Day: Five French Survivors Whose Stories Must Never Be Forgotten

Today marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau by Soviet forces on January 27, 1945. In France, approximately 76,000 Jews were deported to death camps, and only about 2,500 of those deported survived.

France’s role in the Holocaust is complex. The Vichy regime collaborated with the Nazis, and French police organized the roundups that sent men, women, and children to their deaths. Yet remarkably, out of the 330,00 Jews living in France in 1940, 75% survived the Holocaust, one of the highest survival rates in Nazi-occupied Europe. 

They were saved by ordinary citizens who hid them, smuggled them across borders, or simply looked the other way when they should have reported them. Today, we’re shining a light on five French survivors whose stories reveal different faces of that terrible time. 

5 French Holocaust Survivors and Their Stories

Some were in the Resistance, and others were caught simply for being Jewish. All of them lived through something that should never have happened, and all of them spent the rest of their lives making sure the world wouldn’t forget.

Catherine Dior (1917-2008)

Most people know Christian Dior, the designer who gave Paris its glamor back after the war. Not many know his sister Catherine, who spent the war fighting Nazis while he was sketching dresses. Catherine joined the French Resistance in late 1941, shortly after her brother Christian returned to Paris. 

She fell in love with Hervé des Charbonneries, a married Resistance leader, and joined the F2 network, a British-funded intelligence unit set up by the Polish government-in-exile. She used Christian’s Paris apartment at 10 Rue Royale to host underground meetings, transmitting clandestine reports to London from the Massif Central section.

On July 6, 1944, Catherine was arrested along with 26 other members of her group and tortured by the Gestapo. Christian tried desperately to save her, using Nazi contacts he’d made through his work and enlisting Swedish consul-general Raoul Nordling. On August 18, Nordling managed to convince the Nazis to place Catherine under Swedish protection, but she’d already been deported three days earlier on one of the last prison trains leaving Paris.

She arrived at Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp on August 15, 1944. Ravensbrück was considered a slave labor camp rather than an extermination center. It practiced what survivors called “extermination through labour.” Women died by the hundreds from exhaustion, disease, and starvation.

In October 1944, Catherine was transferred to Abteroda, then to the military prison at Torgau, where she worked in the all-female “Anton Kommando” producing explosives in a disused potassium mine. She was later sent to work in an aviation factory at Leipzig-Markkleeberg. When Allied forces approached in April 1945, she was forced into one of the “Death Marches,” where one in three prisoners died. Catherine escaped on April 21, 1945, along with other women from Markkleeberg.

When she finally made it home to Paris, she was unrecognisable. She suffered from injuries to her hips, back, and feet, chronic arthritis, rheumatism, and kidney problems. Along with the physical scars came insomnia, nightmares, memory loss, anxiety, and depression.

For her courage, Catherine received the Croix de Guerre (normally reserved for regular soldiers), the King’s Medal for Courage in the Cause of Freedom, and the Légion d’Honneur. 

Catherine retreated from public life, spending her days working with flowers. First as a flower trader in Paris, then as a flower farmer in Provence, cultivating the roses she loved for fragrance production. 

She rarely spoke of the war, but from 1999 until her death in 2008 at age 90, she served as honorary president of the Christian Dior Museum in Granville, quietly preserving her brother’s legacy.

Simone Veil (1927-2017)

The day after Simone Jacob received her baccalauréat in March 1944, she was arrested by the Gestapo. She’d used her real name to sit the exam. It was a decision that haunted her forever.

Born in Nice on July 13, 1927, to an atheist Jewish family, Simone was the youngest of four siblings. Her father, André Jacob, was an architect who had won the Prix de Rome. He believed deeply in the French Republic and raised his children to be proud of their nationality above all else. 

Along with her family, she was arrested and deported, first to Drancy, then to Auschwitz. Simone was 16 years old. She lied to the Nazis about her age to avoid being immediately sent to the gas chambers. She was shaved from head to toe and tattooed with the serial number 78651 on her arm, a number she never removed and later had engraved on her ceremonial sword when she joined the Académie française.

She was separated from her father and brother at Auschwitz, and they sadly died in the camps. Her mother, Yvonne, succumbed to typhus at Bergen-Belsen, leaving only Simone and her two sisters.

After the war, Simone married Antoine Veil in October 1946 and pursued a law degree. She became a magistrate and entered the National Penitentiary Administration, where she improved conditions for incarcerated women. In 1964, she became director of civil affairs, working to improve the rights and status of French women.

In 1974, President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing appointed her Minister of Health. In November 1974, Simone Veil mounted the tribune of the National Assembly to defend her bill legalizing abortion in France. After her hour-long address, she endured a torrent of abuse from members of her own center-right coalition.

 One lawmaker claimed her law would “each year kill twice as many people as the Hiroshima bomb.” Another Holocaust survivor was berated for “choosing genocide.” Another still spoke of embryos “thrown into crematorium ovens.”

The bill eventually passed, thanks to support from the left-wing opposition. The legislation, still known as “Veil’s law,” became a cornerstone of women’s rights and secularism in France.

As a Holocaust survivor, Veil found it hard to understand how one European country could wage war on another. This experience drove her commitment to European unity. In 1979, she became the first woman elected president of the European Parliament, serving until 1982. She remained in Parliament until 1993, then served on France’s Constitutional Council until 2007.

She died on June 30, 2017, at age 89, and a year later, on July 1, 2018, she was interred in the Panthéon alongside her husband Antoine, becoming only the fifth woman to receive this honor. She joined such greats as Marie Curie, Victor Hugo, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 

Marceline Loridan-Ivens (1928-2018)

Fifteen-year-old Marceline stood next to her father at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He told her, “You might come back, because you’re young, but I won’t come back.” He was right.

Born Marceline Rozenberg in Épinal, France, in 1928, Marceline was the third of five children born to Polish Jewish immigrants. Her parents spoke Yiddish, Russian, and Polish to each other but spoke French to their children, hoping they would become “truly French.”

Jewish, left-handed, a redhead, and a second-generation immigrant, Marceline’s chances of fitting in at school were slim. Still, over time, the family rose from humble beginnings. Her father even bought a château in an attempt to assimilate.

In June 1940, German forces entered France. The Rozenberg family spent a month fleeing southwards. They managed to escape capture for most of the war, but in April 1944, they were eventually rounded up. Marceline and her father, Szlhama Froim Rozenber,g were taken to the Drancy internment camp, then deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau on April 13, 1944. She was on the same transport as Simone Veil.

Marceline was later transferred to Bergen-Belsen, then Theresienstadt. She was liberated on May 10, 1945. But liberation didn’t mean freedom from the camps. She battled their ghosts for the rest of her life.

In 1961, Marceline became one of the first French Holocaust survivors to be interviewed for a cinematic work. She appeared in the documentary “Chronique d’un été” (Chronicle of a Summer), directed by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, which won the Critics’ Award at Cannes. In one iconic scene, she meets several young African students recently arrived in France and explains to them the meaning of the number tattooed on her arm.

In 1963, she married Dutch documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens. Together, they created numerous films documenting injustice worldwide, in Algeria, Vietnam, and China. Like many leftist French intellectuals at the time, she was deeply sympathetic to Maoism, though she later renounced the far left.

From the late 1950s until the last days of her life, Marceline was a fixture on Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés scene, spending time with intellectuals including Roland Barthes and Georges Pérec. She could often be spotted at the legendary Café de Flore.

In 2015, at age 86, she published “But You Did Not Come Back,” a slim memoir written as a letter to the father who never returned. The book became a bestseller in France and was translated into 16 languages. In it, she wrote with devastating honesty about survival and its aftermath, about the life she built and the shadow that never left.

Marceline Loridan-Ivens died on September 18, 2018, in Paris at the age of 90. Small in size, outspoken, with a wild mane of signature red hair, she had become a much-loved public figure. As she wrote in her waning years: “What matters most is to die upright.”

Denise Holstein (1927-2024)

At sixteen, Denise Holstein became a monitor at a Jewish children’s home in Louveciennes, a suburb of Paris. She was put in charge of nine young children, caring for them like a mother while she was still a child herself.

Born in 1927 in Rouen, Denise was the fourth of four children. Her father Bernard was a dentist, the only Jewish dentist in Rouen allowed to continue working during the occupation. Her mother, Juliette, served as an ambulance driver for the French army. In 1940, as Germany invaded, Denise and her brother Jean fled with their grandmother and great-grandmother to Avignon before returning to Rouen.

Her father was arrested during the roundup of May 6, 1942, and interned at Drancy. Denise eventually found herself at the children’s home in Louveciennes, where she looked after her small charges with fierce determination.

On July 22, 1944, Nazi officer Alois Brunner decided to round up all occupants of the children’s homes. Denise continued to care for her little ones in Drancy, hoping desperately that the Allies would arrive in Paris before deportation. They didn’t.

On July 31, 1944, she was deported to Auschwitz with 34 children from Louveciennes. Thirteen hundred people were crammed into the train, packed together with a few mattresses and buckets, barely enough water in the sweltering heat, only tiny openings for air. The journey took three days. Denise sang to the children and consoled them, trying to keep their spirits up.

When they arrived at Auschwitz, Denise was selected for work instead of immediate death. The 34 children from Louveciennes were not so fortunate.

Denise survived Auschwitz-Birkenau and was later transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where conditions were equally horrific. She was liberated in 1945, and like so many survivors, she rarely spoke of her experiences for nearly fifty years. It was only in 1995, after meeting Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld at a reunion, that she published her first testimony: “Je ne vous oublierai jamais, mes enfants d’Auschwitz” (I will never forget you, my children of Auschwitz).

In 2008, she published another book, “Le Manuscrit de Cayeux-sur-Mer,” expanding on her wartime experiences. Over the years, she made several trips to Auschwitz with schoolchildren. She spent her later years sharing her story, ensuring that the children who died would never be forgotten.

Denise Holstein died on November 16, 2024, at the age of 97, one of the last French survivors of Auschwitz.

Robert Clary (1926-2022)

Robert Clary was born Robert Max Widerman on March 1, 1926, in Paris. He was the youngest of 14 children born to Polish Jewish parents who had emigrated to France in 1923. His father, Moishe, was a tailor from Warsaw. The family lived on Île Saint-Louis in subsidized housing for Jewish families.

At age 12, Robert began singing professionally on French radio and studied art in Paris. He was a child with dreams of entertaining, of making people smile. The German occupation in 1940 changed everything.

In September 1942, at age 16, Robert and 12 members of his family were rounded up by French police and deported. First to Drancy, then to the concentration camp at Ottmuth in Upper Silesia (now Poland). He was tattooed with the identification number A5714 on his left forearm, a mark he would carry for the rest of his life.

He was later sent to Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, where he sang to survive. Every other Sunday, he performed for an audience of SS soldiers. His voice, the thing that had brought him joy as a child, became his lifeline.

American troops liberated Buchenwald on April 11, 1945. Robert was 19 years old. He learned that 12 members of his immediate family had been sent to Auschwitz, and that he was the only one who survived. His parents, two sisters, two half-sisters, and two nephews were all murdered.

When he returned to Paris, he reunited with six of his siblings who had avoided deportation and survived the Nazi occupation of France. Robert made a decision: he would never speak of the camps. He had one goal in life, and that was to get back into show business.

And that’s exactly what he did. He began recording songs in 1948 that became popular in both France and the United States, and went to America in October 1949, appearing on The Ed Wynn Show in 1950. He performed on Broadway in “New Faces of 1952” and “Seventh Heaven” in 1955.

In 1965, he was offered the role of Corporal Louis LeBeau on a new television sitcom called “Hogan’s Heroes,” set in a German POW camp during World War II. When people asked if he had qualms about doing a comedy dealing with Nazis and camps, he explained: “Stalag 13 is not a concentration camp. It’s a POW camp, and that’s a world of difference. You never heard of a prisoner of war being gassed or hanged.”

The show ran for six seasons and made Robert famous. He later appeared on soap operas including “Days of Our Lives,” “The Young and the Restless,” and “The Bold and the Beautiful.”

For 35 years, Robert refused to speak publicly about his Holocaust experience. Then in 1980, he watched a PBS documentary about a survivor who visited Auschwitz with her son. She said something that woke him up: “You know, 30, 40 years from now, we’re all going to be dead. Who is going to tell people about what happened?”

Robert began speaking at high schools and community groups. He volunteered with the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. In 1994, he was among the first 100 Holocaust survivors interviewed by Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, established by Steven Spielberg after “Schindler’s List.” Then, just weeks after recording his own testimony, he volunteered as an interviewer and recorded 75 more testimonies.

In 2001, he published his autobiography, “From the Holocaust to Hogan’s Heroes.” He told a reporter in 1997: “I beg the next generation not to do what people have done for centuries: hate others because of their skin, shape of their eyes, or religious preference.”

Robert Clary died on November 16, 2022, at his home in Los Angeles at age 96. He was the last surviving member of the original principal cast of “Hogan’s Heroes.”

The Hidden Children: Thousands of French Jews Saved by Strangers

Not every survivor’s story involves a concentration camp. Some 6,000 children, mostly Jewish, were placed by refugee organizations with French families or in group homes and survived the war hidden in plain sight.

The most famous example is Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a Protestant village in south-central France. The town had been a refuge for persecuted Huguenots since the 17th century, so its residents understood what it meant to be hunted for your faith.

From 1940 to 1944, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and neighboring villages provided shelter to approximately 5,000 people, among them 3,000 to 3,500 Jews fleeing persecution. Led by Pastor André Trocmé of the Reformed Church of France, his wife Magda, and his assistant Pastor Edouard Theis, the residents offered shelter in private homes, hotels, on farms, and in schools.

They forged identification and ration cards for refugees, and in some cases guided them across the border to neutral Switzerland. These actions of rescue were unusual during the Holocaust because they involved the majority of the population of an entire region.

The refugees were mostly foreign-born Jews who didn’t hold French citizenship, and the majority were children. They were dispersed among small, isolated villages and farms in the mountainous region surrounding Le Chambon.

OSE (Oeuvre de Secours Aux Enfants, Children’s Aid Society), a French-Jewish child care agency, played an important role in escorting children to Le Chambon and placing them in private homes, boarding houses, and seven houses funded specifically to shelter them. The Swiss Red Cross and American Friends Service Committee (Quakers) also provided crucial support.

When a Nazi official tried to organize a Hitler Youth camp in the village, the students told him that they “make no distinction between Jews and non-Jews. It is contrary to Gospel teaching.”

The only major tragedy came on June 29, 1943, when German police raided a children’s home and arrested 25 students, 20 of them Jewish, along with teacher Daniel Trocmé (André’s cousin). Few of those arrested survived the war. Daniel Trocmé was executed at the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland.

Most of the time, the French authorities and German commander in the region chose to ignore the refugees’ existence. The German army even commandeered three hotels in Chambon for the convalescence of their wounded soldiers while Jewish children hid in houses nearby.

In 1990, the entire town was recognized as “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial. It was one of only two towns to receive this collective honor. A garden and plaque on the grounds of Yad Vashem were dedicated to the people of Chambon-sur-Lignon.

When Magda Trocmé reflected on her choices years after the war, she said, “When people read this story, I want them to know that I tried to open my door. I tried to tell people, ‘Come in, come in.’ In the end, I would like to say to people, ‘Remember that in your life there will be lots of circumstances where you will need a kind of courage, a kind of decision on your own, not about other people but about yourself.'”

The Camps on French Soil: Where 74,000 Jews Were Held Before Deportation

People think of Auschwitz when they think of concentration camps. But before French Jews reached Poland, they passed through camps on French soil, guarded by French police.

Drancy: The Anteroom of Death

Drancy was located in a northeastern suburb of Paris. In August 1941, the Germans established an internment camp there following the arrest of more than 4,200 Jewish men in Paris. The camp was housed in a multistory U-shaped building originally built in the 1930s as a housing project.

Beginning in summer 1942, Drancy became the major transit camp for the deportation of Jews from France. Until July 1943, French police staffed the camp under the overall control of the German Security Police. The inmates were guarded by French policemen.

The food supplies at the camp were meager. A daily ration consisted of 600-800 calories. From August 1942, conditions improved slightly thanks to assistance from Jewish organizations and the Red Cross, as well as food parcels sent by family members. But in July 1943, when the Germans took direct control, and SS officer Alois Brunner became commandant, living conditions deteriorated again.

Despite the difficult conditions, Jews in the camp maintained cultural and religious life. They arranged concerts and literary evenings, read books smuggled into the camp, and established a school. Hundreds participated in Sabbath prayers and religious ceremonies, marking Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, even after the Germans forbade Jewish ceremonies in June 1942.

Famous prisoners included poet Max Jacob, who perished in the camp in 1944; Pierre Massé, member of Georges Clemenceau’s government (deported to Auschwitz in September 1942 and murdered); René Blum, brother of 1930s French Prime Minister Léon Blum; and author Tristan Bernard.

Forty-one escape attempts were made by prisoners. In September 1943, 70 prisoners started digging an escape tunnel four meters underground. The work was discovered in November 1943, and many prisoners were executed, including the camp’s resistance leader, Robert Blum.

From June 1942 to July 1944, approximately 64,000 Jews were deported from Drancy to extermination camps in Eastern Europe on 64 transports. More than 20,000 deportees had French citizenship, some 15,000 were Polish Jews, and some 6,000 were from Germany. Fewer than 2,000 survived the Holocaust.

Gurs

The French government established the Gurs camp in April 1939, before the war with Germany and well before the occupation of France in June 1940. Originally, Gurs served as a detention camp for political refugees and members of the International Brigade fleeing Spain after the Spanish Civil War.

In early 1940, the French government also interned about 4,000 German Jewish refugees as “enemy aliens,” along with French leftist political leaders who opposed the war with Germany. After the French armistice with Germany in June 1940, Gurs fell under the authority of the Vichy regime.

Conditions in the Gurs camp were very primitive. It was overcrowded, and there was a constant shortage of water, food, and clothing. In October 1940, German authorities deported around 6,500 Jews from the Baden region of southwest Germany across the border into the unoccupied zone of France. The Vichy government interned most of them in Gurs.

One in four of the Baden deportees died in Gurs or other French camps, 11 percent succeeded in emigrating overseas, 12 percent hid out in France, and 40 percent (around 2,600 deportees) were transported to Auschwitz after July 1942.

Between August 6, 1942, and March 3, 1943, Vichy officials turned over 3,907 Jewish prisoners from Gurs to the Germans. The Germans sent the majority to Drancy, from where they were deported in six convoys to the killing centers in German-occupied Poland, primarily Auschwitz. Vichy authorities closed the Gurs camp in November 1943.

Other Major French Camps

The French Jews from the Occupied Zone were interned for the most part in four main camps: Pithiviers, Beaune-la-Rolande, Compiègne, and Drancy. In the south of France, additional camps included Rivesaltes, Camp des Milles near Aix-en-Provence, and Le Vernet in the Ariège.

By the beginning of 1941, some 40,000 Jews had already been arrested. They were incarcerated in 15 concentration camps operated by the Vichy regime. The concentration camps provided only meager nutrition and faulty sanitary facilities. Hundreds of prisoners died due to disease, cold, and starvation.

Of the 54,000 Jews who passed through the camp of Compiègne, 50,000 were deported to their extermination. The Jews who had been arrested in the big waves of arrests in May 1941 and July 1942 were interned in Pithiviers. Beginning in July 1942, thousands of Jews were deported from Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande to Auschwitz.

The Camp des Milles was the largest internment camp in the southeast of France. 2,500 Jews were deported from there following the August 1942 raids. Novelist Lion Feuchtwanger and Surrealist artists Hans Bellmer and Max Ernst were among the most famous inmates detained there.

The concentration camps in France continued operating during the summer of 1944, which marked the height of the battle for Paris and the Allied campaign to liberate France.

A Complicated Legacy

For decades, the French government declined to apologize for the role of the French police in the roundups or for other state complicity. Its argument was that Philippe Pétain dismantled the French Republic when he instituted the Vichy State during the war, and that the Republic had been re-established when the war ended. It was not for the Republic, therefore, to apologize for events that happened while it did not exist.

President François Mitterrand maintained this position throughout his presidency. The claim was reiterated during the 2017 presidential election campaign by Marine Le Pen, leader of the extreme right National Front Party.

Everything changed in 1995 when President Jacques Chirac broke with decades of denial. He acknowledged France’s responsibility for the deportation of Jews during the war.

In July 2012, President François Hollande gave a speech at a monument to the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup on its 70th anniversary. He recognized that this event was a crime committed “in France, by France,” and emphasized that the deportations in which French police participated were offenses committed against French values, principles, and ideals.

In July 2017, President Emmanuel Macron went even further, denouncing his country’s role in the Holocaust and the historical revisionism that denied France’s responsibility for the 1942 roundup and subsequent deportation of 13,000 Jews. “It was indeed France that organized this,” he said. French police collaborated with the Nazis. “Not a single German took part,” he added.

Today, as survivors pass away, their voices become more precious. Catherine Dior, Simone Veil, and Marceline Loridan-Ivens are gone now, along with most of those who survived. France has the third highest number of citizens awarded the Righteous Among the Nations, recognition for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

But antisemitism is rising again in France and across Europe. The lessons these survivors spent their lives teaching risk being forgotten. These stories are proof that ordinary people can do extraordinary good, and that ordinary people can participate in extraordinary evil. The choice, as it always has been, is ours.