Tribute to Charles Baron, who died on Tuesday 4 October

Charles Baron at the Shoah Memorial on May 4, 2016, during the Yom Hashoah ceremony

Charles Baron, a Shoah survivor, died on Tuesday, October 4 at the age of 90. The Memorial pays tribute to him.

A former deportee and survivor of the Birkenau camp, Charles Baron died on Tuesday at the age of 90. All his life, he was able to bear witness to the inhumanity of the concentration camp universe.

Born in Paris on 18 July 1926, only child of a father of Polish origin and a French mother, born in Paris in 1902. After the occupation of France, he often lived with his grandparents, agricultural workers, in the small village of Cernay-la-ville (Yvelines). His parents were rounded up during the great "Vél. d'Hiv roundup" on 16 July 1942 and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau by convoy no. 10. His mother will be gassed upon her arrival and his father selected for pseudo-medical "experiments" by the SS doctor Johann-Paul Kremer. An apprentice leather goods merchant in Paris, Charles is arrested by the police at the Versailles police station during a check-up at St Rémy-les-Chevreuse railway station (Seine-et-Oise). He was interned for five days at the Drancy camp before being deported by convoy no. 34 on 18 September 1942.

In Kosel, in Silesia, he was chosen for various "forced labor camps for Jews in Silesia" (annexes to Auschwitz and Gross Rosen) then sent to the Auschwitz extermination camp.Birkenau where he will witness a vile staging for the killing of hundreds of Lithuanian Jewish children on the night of the Jewish New Year (October 1944). He is finally transferred to Dachau (Bavaria) for the construction of a factory of secret armaments but escapes with a friend from an evacuation train.

At the end of April 1945, extremely weakened (Charles weighs 29 kg for 1.60 m), he was repatriated to Paris, three years to the day after his deportation. He married in 1950 to Micheline, a deportee’s daughter who did not return and who restored his taste for life. They would have two daughters together.

"When one of us was about to die, he asked us to tell the others"

Between 1950 and 1960, it then became essential to bear witness, and Charles Baron surrounded himself with friends who had survived the Shoah: Ida Grynspan, Yvette Lévy and Henri Wolff, and confided: "I didn’t have a crazy confidence in myself but my principle was that if you want something, you shouldn’t wait for it to come, you should go get it."  He then engages in the struggle of a lifetime: to recount the horror and inhumanity of the camps through his experience. His testimony finds its place among the younger generations who listen, understand and learn from history.

Charles Baron was a member of the editorial board of the "revue d'histoire de la Shoah" published by the Mémorial de la Shoah. His testimony was filmed by the "Spielberg Foundation", MK2 (2h27) and the INA in 2004.

We invite you to rediscover his testimony:

All our thoughts are with his loved ones today.