Tribute to Charles Palant, who passed away on Friday 26 February 2016

Testimony of Charles Palant, from the "Last Witnesses" campaign carried out by the Shoah Memorial and the Paris City Hall in 2004.

Born in 1922 in the Parisian Belleville of all immigrants – his parents had fled Poland from the pogroms –, Charles Palant committed himself very early in the fight against fascism. In July 1941, he crossed the demarcation line towards Lyon, where he joined his family and many friends. Charles Palant is 21 years old when he is arrested by the Gestapo, in August 1943, for possession of false papers, with his mother and sister, while his older brother escapes them by chance.

First imprisoned at Fort-Montluc, all three were then deported to Drancy and then to Auschwitz, from where his mother and sister would not return. «We understand that if we give in to grief, we are dead», he says. Charles Palant recounts the "descent into animality" of the deportees from Buna-Monowitz (Auschwitz III), his selection for the gas chamber to which, sick, he escapes thanks to the memory of the jokes of a singer from Lyon, his Death March with 60,000 deportees in early 1945, then the train to Buchenwald (Germany), and the insurrection of this camp, the day before the arrival of the American liberators. After 650 days spent in hell, Charles Palant did not feel «the enemy of anyone, not even the Germans».

"At the end of the most abominable failure of human organization," he embarked on the struggle for the construction of a "better world."

Charles Palant was co-founder of MRAP in 1949 - at the time «Movement against Racism, Anti-Semitism and for Peace» - he ensured its leadership by successively holding the positions of Secretary General and President. Later, in 1977, he was behind the change of name for MRAP, which then became «Movement against Racism and for Friendship between Peoples». Until 2015, he also represented MRAP at the CNCDH (National Consultative Commission on Human Rights).