Tribute to Elie Buzyn, survivor of the Shoah, who died on May 23, 2022, at the age of 93.

Elie Buzyn, a great witness of the Shoah, died on Monday, May 23, 2022, in Paris.

Elie Buzyn was born in Lodz, Poland on January 7, 1929. He comes from a well-off family, his father is a business owner and his mother works for WIZO. He is the youngest, his brother Avram is 11 years old and his sister Tauba 5 years old.

Elie is 10 years old during the invasion of Poland in 1939. While the Jews are now forced to join the ghetto, his brother is killed on March 7, 1940 for example. His parents are annihilated. Elie suddenly understands that he has become a breadwinner and he will only have one obsession: to protect his family.

In January 1942, he celebrated his religious majority clandestinely during which his exhausted mother asked him to do everything to survive and join the two brothers she had in Paris.

While the Nazis in the autumn of 1942 eliminate the Jews who could no longer work, Elie manages to avoid the deportation to the camp of Chelmno for his parents and sister. The family goes into hiding.

Faced with the advance of the Red Army troops, the ghetto is liquidated and the population transferred to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in August 1944. The family is dislocated during the selection on arrival. The parents are murdered in the gas chambers. Elie and his sister join the camp. He is 15 years old. He is then transferred to the Auschwitz I camp and then assigned to the agricultural commando of Babitz.

On 18 January 1945, he was evacuated to the Buchenwald camp which he reached three days later. Injured, he is sent to the Revier and manages to avoid amputation of the toes. Thanks to the action of the clandestine Resistance, he joined Block 8 of the "big camp" where hundreds of Jewish children were gathered and helped.

After the liberation of the camp on 11 April 1945, a thousand Jewish children were taken in by the relief work for children, 426 of whom were welcomed in France. Among them, Elie who finds after a few weeks his maternal uncle, Dr Léon Pérel, then his sister repatriated from the camp of Bergen-Belsen.

In October 1947, Elie leaves for Palestine to participate in the war of independence and the birth of the State of Israel.

He returns to France in 1954 and joins Oran in Algeria as a boarding school supervisor, while passing his baccalaureate. Two years later, he settles permanently in Paris and undertakes medical studies. He becomes an orthopedic surgeon.

Retired in 1995, he carries out humanitarian missions in Africa, notably in Mauritania and Cameroon.

He began to testify about his experience during the Holocaust from 1998 and from then on did not stop intervening in front of classes all over France, while also campaigning within the Work of Relief for Children. He ended his interventions by calling on his audience to become "the witnesses of the witnesses".

An accomplished athlete, he was selected to carry the Olympic flame at the Winter Olympics in Turin in 2006.

Elie Buzyn published in 2018 his autobiographical story: J'étais 15 ans, vivre, survivre, revivre, Alisio, 2018, and Ce que je voudrais transmettre. Letter to the new generations, Alisio, 2019.

Elie Buzyn was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor in 2014 and a Commander in the Order of Academic Palms in 2017.

The Shoah Memorial pays tribute to the memory of a great witness of the Shoah, a generous and modest man, with luminous humanism, and offers its condolences to his wife Etty and his family.

Photo: portrait of Elie Buzyn with other comrades, 1946. 3^e left. © Memorial of the Shoah/coll. Elie Buzyn

Discover the testimony of Elie Buzyn during our campaign "What I want to convey", 2020