Tribute to Claude Hampel, who died on 11 November 2016

Claude Hampel during the Yom HaShoah ceremony at the Shoah Memorial © J-M Lebaz

Claude Hampel, a survivor of the Holocaust and a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, was a journalist and writer. Creator of the Yiddish Notebooks, he had also received the title of Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur and Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. Claude Hampel passed away on November 11, 2016 at the age of 73. The Shoah Memorial pays tribute to this intellectual with an exemplary career. All our thoughts are with his family and loved ones.

Born in 1943 in the Warsaw ghetto, Claude Hampel was originally named Casimir.  Claude owes his survival to a Polish couple, the Michalskis, now one of the 6,000 Polish Righteous Among the Nations, who save him in extremis from the ghetto, making him one of the youngest survivors.

"I am the child of silence, of daily anguish"

Claude Hampel and his mother were then welcomed by the Michalski couple who offered them refuge in the Warsaw region. He was almost two years old when Germany capitulated and his mother met Jacob Hampel, who would become his father. They then fled communist Poland for human rights France.

After working in various small jobs in the 1960s, Claude became a journalist in the Yiddish press at Unzer Remercier, then at Unzer Wortt, brilliantly ensuring the continuity of Yiddish in his activist life as well as in his personal life.  He will not rest, all his life, to honor the memory of a language that has almost disappeared.

Founder of the Yiddish Cahiers, he also oversaw the editorial office of the Cahiers du Cercle Bernard Lazare.

Claude Hampel quickly embodies the emblem of a will to survive and remember: he ensures and preserves through his work the presence of the identity of the Yiddish language. A man of letters and culture with open and generous ideas, he courageously maintains the existence of a threatened language.

In October 2011, he launched a weekly program in the Yiddish language on Radio J.

During the presentation of the Idel Korman prize, Charles Dobzynski paid tribute to him: "Claude Hampel is one of the symbols of hope, fidelity to an ideal and a heritage."

All his life, Claude Hampel has been able to defend and maintain the memory of Yiddish, whose maintenance is in his eyes a duty and a mission of honor. He knew how to cultivate this root of memory, which is also a root of hope.