Meeting with Jean and Marie Vaislic White Shadows Bookstore in Toulouse

The testimony is essential in the construction of the memory of the Shoah. He is an irreplaceable source for the researcher and the historian, he gives a human face to the transmission of knowledge indissociable from the emotion. Yet, nearly 70 years after this tragedy, it is obvious that the witnesses disappear, that their voice goes out.
Among these voices that can still be heard, there is the one of the spouses Vaislic. Like many others survivors, they decided to testify late. Marie published her story in 2014, while Jean’s is expected for 2016.

Their stories are both similar and very different. Marie Rafalovich was 14 years old when her life changed on July 24, 1944. Denounced by a neighbor in Toulouse, she is arrested by a French militiaman and a member of the Gestapo. Locked up in the Caffarelli barracks with rounded-up Jewish families, she is deported to Germany and taken to the women’s camp at Ravensbrück. Alone, the young teenager faces the Nazi terror. She quickly understands that she can only rely on herself. In early 1945, following the evacuation of the camp, she was transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where she lived during the liberation of the camp.

Jean Vaislic was born in Lodz, Poland’s second city. He too experienced the horror at 14. The ghetto, his father’s disappearance, escaping into the countryside, arrest, Auschwitz, the death march... Jean Vaislic remains the sole survivor of a family of 63 people.

I do not wish anyone to experience what I have experienced.
I am not the only one to have experienced it.
But it is impossible for me to get rid of him.
If I could brainwash these memories, I would.
I think about it every day but I don’t talk about it.
"Why didn’t you say so?" my sons tell me.
Because it’s impossible.

                                                                                          Jean Vaislic

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