As France is preparing to mark the 80 -year anniversary of Nazi surrender to the Allied forces, survivors of 2nd World War reflect on painful memories of fear, deprivation and persecution shaped by the German occupation of the country and the deportation of Jews and others to death camps.
In May 1940, Nazi forces swept through France. Among those trapped in the chaos, was 15-year-old Geneviève Perrier, who fled his village in northeastern France to escape the progressive German troops like millions of others. In June, France had surrendered.
Three years later, Esther Senot, 15, was arrested by French police and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In 1944, 19-year-old Ginette Kolinka was sent to the same death camp.
Now close to 100 years old, women continue to share their stories, determined to keep the memory of war alive and pass on its lessons to future generations.
Geneviève Perrier, 99, A Civil During Nazi -Occupation
“We were scared,” Perrier remembered when she described escape by bicycle with her mother, only with a small travel bag, while her uncle took a horse -drawn carriage on the roads in eastern France.
“There were plenty of people who fled, with children in baby wagons, everyone ran away. There was a pillar of civilians who fled and a pillar of French soldiers who fled,” she said.
Perrier and others hid in a field when they heard bombers. “Mom had a white hat. Some told her, ‘Remove your hat!’ And that was when I saw a huge bomb over our heads.
Later took a train, Perrier found refuge for a few months in a small town in southwestern France, in an area governed by the Vichy Cooperation Committee before her mother decided they would go home -only to live under hard Nazi occupation.
“The resistance was great in our area,” Perrier said, adding that she was willing to join the so -called French forces in the interior (FFI). Three women from FFI were caught and tortured by the Nazis just a few miles away from her home, she remembered.
“My mother continued to tell me, ‘No, I don’t want you to leave. I don’t have a man anymore, so if you go …’, she said.” She was right because all three of them were killed. “
Perrier still kept his spirit of resistance in her daily life.
“In church there was a Catholic hymn,” she said, sang, “Catholic and French, always!”
“We bent it with all our power, in the hope that they (the Nazi soldiers) would hear,” she said.
When the Allied forces landed on Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944, Perrier said she didn’t have much access to news and couldn’t believe it.
Later that year, she saw the troops of General Leclerscs 2nd French Division, equipped with American tanks, enter her village. “They freed us, and there was a tank that had stopped almost right outside the door. So of course I went to see the thought. And then they kept a ball not far away,” she said.
Mot the end of the war brought French men a German soldier, whom they accused of killing a baby to the village cemetery. “They made him dig his grave. They put him in it … They killed him,” she said.
Esther Senot, 97, Holocaust Survivor
Esther Senot was born in Poland from a Jewish family that emigrated to France in the late 1930s, and was 15 years old when she was arrested in Paris by the French police. She was deported in September 1943 to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp of cattle trains. At the ramp, the Nazis chose the ones they could use as forced laborers.
“A German with his speaker said: Elderly, women, children, those who are tired can get on the trucks,” she remembered. “Out of the 1,000 people we were, 650 came on the trucks …. and 106 of us, women, were chosen to go back to work in the camp for forced labor.” Others were gassed to death shortly after their arrival.
Senot survived 17 months in Auschwitz-Birkenau and other camps and returned to France at the age of 17.
In the spring of 1945, the Lutetia Hotel in Paris became a gathering place for those who returned from the concentration camps. Senot described the amount of people looking for missing family members, some brought photos of their loved ones, while walls were covered with posters indicating the names of the survivors.
“It was bureaucratic,” Senot said. “In the first count they gave us temporary identity cards. Then they gave us a pretty basic medical examination … and those who were lucky enough to find their family went to an office where they got some money and were told, ‘Now you have completed the formalities … You go home.'”
Seventeen members of Senot’s family were killed by the Nazis during World War II, including her mother, her father and six siblings.
At a recent memorial day in front of the hotel, Senot said she had hoped that her survival would “testify to the absolute crime in which we were caught.” But when she was back in France, she felt the hardest thing was that the indifference to fate for those who had been deported.
“France had been freed for a year, and people didn’t expect us to return with all misery in the world on our shoulders,” she said.
In her former Parisian Quarter, a small crowd saw her. “I weighed 32 kilos (70 pounds) when I came back, my hair was shaved. One year after the liberation, people had not met any woman who looked like that.”
Senot said when she began to explain what happened to her, “You could see unbelievers in their eyes.” “And suddenly they got anger. They said, ‘But you’ve gotten crazy, you’re talking about rubbish, it couldn’t have happened.’ And I will always remember the face of a man who looked at me and said, ‘You came back in so small numbers, what did you do to come back and not the others?’ “
Ginette Kolinka, 100, Holocaust Survivor
Kolinka, who was 19, when she was deported in April 1944 to Auschwitz-Birkenau, is well known in France to share her lively memories of the concentration camps with the younger generation in the last two decades.
In June 1945, when she returned to Paris, she weighed only 26 kilos (57 pounds) and was very weak. Compared to some others, she still felt “lucky” to find her mother and four sisters alive in France when she got home. Her father, a brother and a sister died in death camps.
She did not talk about the war for over half a century. “Those who told their story are true that it seemed incredible (at the time),” she said.
Six million European Jews and people from other minorities were killed by the Nazis and their partners during the Holocaust.
In the 2000s, Kolinka joined an association of surviving deported and began to speak out.
“What we need to keep in mind is that all that happened was because a man (Adolf Hitler) hated the Jews,” she said.
“Hate, for me, is dangerous,” she added. “As soon as we say: One is like that, one is like that, it already proves that we make a difference when we are in reality, whether we are Jews, Muslims, Christians, black, we are human beings.”
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AP journalists Nicolas Garriga and Patrick Hermansen contributed to the story.