A week after Marceline Loridan-Ivens, another of the last survivors of the Shoah and an Auschwitz survivor passed away on the night of 24 to 25 September 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, especially to the schoolchildren she accompanied in the footsteps of her history at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Born in Paris in 1929, to parents from Poland 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 the Deux-Sèvres. But on the night of 30 to 31 January 1944, she was arrested by French gendarmes. On 10 February 1944, she was deported to Auschwitz by convoy no. 68, at the age of only 14. His mother had already been arrested on 16 July 1942, during the Vel’d'Hiv' roundup. His father was also deported in July 1944.
Ida Grinspan posing with her parents Chaja and Jankiel Doorszab. France, 1930s
At Auschwitz, Ida Grinspan, who thought she would find her mother, became number 75360 and worked in the Kommando of Stones and Potatoes, then at the Union Meteallwerke (weapons) factory. In January 1945, she participated in the "death marches" and found herself in Ravensbrück, then in Neustadt-Glewe, with typhus and frozen feet. Released by the Americans and the Soviets, she was repatriated to France and reunited with her brother. Her father and mother did not return.
Portrait of Ida GRINSPAN, born in Marseille, photographed six weeks after her return from deportation,
Tirelessly, Ida testified 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 barbarism of concentration camps that she told simply, without drawing tears. His book, published in 2002 (with Bertrand Poirot-Delpech) was also entitled "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:
