A week after Marceline Loridan-Ivens, another of the last survivors of the Holocaust and survivor of Auschwitz left us in the night from September 24 to 25, 2018, at the age of 89. Ida Grinspan, who had lost her father and mother at Auschwitz, testified for a long time at the Shoah Memorial, notably with the schoolchildren she accompanied in the footsteps of her history, at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Born in Paris in 1929, to parents originally from Poland and who had arrived in France a few years earlier to escape anti-Semitism, Ida was entrusted at the beginning of the war to a nurse in a village in Deux-Sèvres. But, during the night of January 30 to 31, 1944, she was arrested by French gendarmes. On February 10, 1944, she was deported to Auschwitz by convoy no. 68, at only 14 years old. His mother was already arrested on July 16, 1942, during the roundup of Vel’ d'Hiv’. His father will also be deported in July 1944.
Ida Grinspan posing with her parents Chaja and Jankiel Fensterszab. France, 1930s
In Auschwitz, Ida Grinspan, who thought she would find her mother again, becomes registration number 75360 and works at the Kommando of stones, potatoes, then at the Union Meteallwerke factory (armament). In January 1945, she participated in the "death marches" and found herself in Ravensbrück, then in Neustadt-Glewe, with typhus and frozen feet. Liberated by the Americans and the Soviets, she is repatriated to France and finds her brother. Her father and mother will not return.
Portrait of Ida GRINSPAN, born FENSTERSZAB, photographed six weeks after her return from deportation,
Tirelessly, Ida bore witness to the younger ones. Every year, she enthusiastically accepted to come and testify before the professors during the summer universities at the Shoah Memorial. Thousands of students crossed her path and she accompanied several generations of high school students to Auschwitz, on the traces of the barbarity of concentration camps that she simply told, without drawing tears. His book, published in 2002 (with Bertrand Poirot-Delpech) was also titled "J'ai pas pleuré". He is a great figure of memory who has left us. All our thoughts go to his loved ones.
(Re) see the testimonies of Ida Grinspan at the Memorial:
