MIL OSI Translation. Government of the Republic of France statements from French to English –
With the death of Victor Perahia, President of the Union of Auschwitz Deportees, France has lost a transmitter of memory, one of the faces of the remembrance of the Shoah for the Nation.
Born on April 4, 1933, Victor Perahia was born into a family of street vendors. From his childhood, and then during the Occupation, the child of a father of Turkish origin and a French mother was confronted with the anti-Semitism of his classmates. On July 15, 1942, in Saint-Nazaire, Victor and his parents were arrested by the SS, then taken to Angers. From there, his father was deported to Auschwitz; Victor Perahia and his mother to Drancy. In the camp, overcrowded by the simultaneous arrival of prisoners from the Vél’ d’Hiv roundup of July 16, they survived hunger, violence and cold, and avoided deportation thanks to his mother’s cunning. The latter in fact claimed to be a prisoner of war’s wife and demonstrated this by tirelessly reciting the story of a life that was not hers. On May 20, 1944, they were deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration and labor camp where, for a year, Victor Perahia accompanied his mother in the tragedy, with a life force that made him certain he would survive. On April 22, 1945, this time, bloodless, suffering from typhus, Victor Perahia felt his strength leave him: “Victor, if you love me, don’t die,” his mother told him. The next day, the camp was liberated by the Russian army. Orphaned by his father Robert and in mourning for his maternal grandfather, who died at Auschwitz, still ill, the young survivor spent two years in a sanatorium.
Victor Perahia rebuilt his life after the war by resuming his studies, starting a family with his wife Rosette, leaving this “stolen childhood” to silence and oblivion for decades, according to the book he would finally publish in 2015. This book, the fruit of six years of writing, was the first milestone in a work of memory and transmission that Victor Perahia continued, by testifying for the younger generations in the schools of Paris or at the Shoah memorial. With his humanity, his uncompromising words, his lively knowledge of the Drancy camp, he transmitted his experience of deportation. In Drancy, he recounted, at the sight of the buildings, cars, buses seen through the barbed wire, he asked himself “but why am I behind barbed wire, guarded by police, while these people far away can go home”. This childish question, this universal cry of conscience, this intransigence in the face of racism and anti-Semitism still haunted him and guided his strength to awaken minds. As a lesson or testament for future generations, he considered “human cruelty” to be limitless, and the duty to fight against “all forms of intolerance and all attacks on basic human rights” to be imprescriptible.
The President of the Republic and his wife bow before a life guided by the will to never cease believing in humanity, in the hope of justice and freedom. They address to his family, to his loved ones, to the women and men who, like him, bear the memory of the Shoah, their heartfelt condolences.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is a translation. Apologies should the grammar and/or sentence structure not be perfect.