Tribute to André Berkover, survivor of the Shoah

Portrait of André Berkover. France, 1940s

Fellow deportees, professors, members of the National Federation of Deportees and Internees, Resistants and Patriots, and the Foundation for the Memory of the Deportation, The mayor of Montreuil and his deputies, along with many other people, gathered at the old Montreuil cemetery on 24 August to pay their last respects to André Berkover, a survivor of the Shoah.

André Berkover was born on 29 July 1929 in Paris to a Romanian-Polish family, and grew up in the 20th arrondissement of the capital. On 28 June 1944, he was arrested by the Gestapo while hiding at your aunt’s house. Deported to Drancy, he found his brother Guy there before being deported by convoy no. 76 on 30 June 1944, with his mother. At Auschwitz, he followed the group of men over 16 years old when he was only 14. He will be selected for work and assigned to Auschwitz III Buna-Monowitz. Later, he managed to escape during the "death marches" and was helped by Polish farmers and treated by Soviet men before being repatriated to Paris. At the Hotel Lutetia, André finds his father and older sister, but his mother and brother will not return from the camps. André became an industrial designer and settled in Montreuil in 1964 with his wife Liliane and two children.

In 1995, during the 50 years from the liberation of the camps and while the collective memory of the Shoah wakes up, André Berkover decides to speak for the first time. Since then, he has not stopped testifying to middle and high school students, especially between 2005 and 2017, a period during which he was one of the most active witnesses at the Shoah Memorial, in schools or for the Auschwitz Memory Fund Association. André Berkover also regularly intervened in the schools in Montreuil and accompanied the city’s high school students during study trips to Auschwitz.
In 2007, André Berkover published his testimony André Berkover, registration number A165572, Société des gens de lettres de France, 2007.