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 inseparable from emotion. However, nearly 70 years after this tragedy, it is obvious that the witnesses disappear, that their voice goes out.
Among those voices that can still be heard, there is that of the spouses Vaislic. Like many others survivors, they decided to testify late. Marie published her account in 2014 while Jean’s is expected for 2016.

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

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

I don’t wish on 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 it.
If I could brainwash these memories, I would.
I think about it every day but 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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