Henri Lilienzstejn passed away on April 20, 2025. The Shoah Memorial extends its most sincere condolences to his family, his wife Regine and his son Jean.
Born on 29 October 1929, Henri and his mother Chaja were caught in the Vel d'hiv roundup in July 1942. At his mother’s behest, he looked for a way to escape. He took advantage of a moment of hesitation during the change of the French gendarmes to escape. Chaja, his mother, was murdered at Auschwitz.
With her elder sister Tilly and her father, they left for Voiron where they entered a network of resistance. They have once again escaped a major roundup. Tilly and Henri took refuge at the Pont-de-Claix near Grenoble, where they trafficked weapons for the Vercors maquis. The French police eventually arrested Tilly and put her in prison in Lyon in 1944. She survived this ordeal, which marked her for life. Henri joined the maquis of the Pyrenees and, at fifteen years old, was the youngest survivor allowed to cross the border through the Alps where the JOINT took care of him.
Back in Paris in 1945, he became a tailor with his father. He took evening classes to learn how to repair televisions. In 1949, the French government offered to francize the volunteers' names. Israel became Jacques and the family became Lilensten.
Henri Lilensten quickly became interested in electronics. He continued to take courses at the ORT. Responding to an advertisement from the great electronics engineer, the immigrant Russian Jew Eugene Aisberg, he was hired as a journalist in electronics. Quickly rising through the ranks, he became editor-in-chief of the "electronic industrial" newspaper and one of the first in Europe. His author’s name was then Henri Lilen. Under this name, he published electronic books, particularly on integrated circuits. In 1968, he met François Gernelle, the father of microcomputers. Fascinated, he built one at home – the second microcomputer in the world! – began to write articles on microcomputing. In 1982, he founded the magazine "microcomputers". He became one of the most influential IT journalists in Europe, and met all the major players in the field, from the USA to Japan. Under the name of Henri Lilen and a few aliases, he wrote more than 500 books on electronics and computer science, three of which trace the extraordinary history of this conceptual and industrial revolution. His latest book, "The Beautiful History of Digital Revolutions" (De Boeck, 2022), was translated into Chinese in 2025.
He passed away peacefully on Sunday, April 20, 2025 at the age of 95, spending his last hours in the sweet atmosphere of Yiddish music with his son Jean.
