Maurice Cling Credit: Daniel Cling
Maurice Cling was born
When anti-Semitic legislation forced Jacques at the beginning of the Second World War to affix a notice identifying his shop as a "Jewish company", he placed next to it a display stand with his decorations and the inscription "French, volunteer, wounded in the war 1914-1918". to denounce this stigmatization. Very popular in the neighborhood, the approach is a sensation. The next day, an inspector comes to order him to remove it.
Arrested in his class at the École Lavoisier on his fifteenth birthday, May 4, 1944, Maurice Cling was interned at the Drancy camp with his brother Willy, 17 years old, his mother and father. On 20 May 1944, the whole family was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in convoy 74. His parents are murdered upon arrival at the camp. Assigned to the Auschwitz-I camp, Maurice manages to hold out with the support of his brother, from whom he is separated during a "selection" in October and whom he will never see again. After several particularly trying kommandos, and a parenthesis at the kommando
Repatriated to France, very weakened, he arrived at the Gare de l'Est in Paris on 18 May 1945 and found his grandparents, his aunt and his cousin who had not been deported.
Associate of English, linguist, he taught at the high school of Nîmes, in Great Britain and finally from 1962 in higher education, at the Sorbonne then, becoming a doctor of State, as university professor at Paris XIII, where he directed the department of English.
He joined the French Communist Party in 1950. Early committed to the board of directors of the Amicale d'Auschwitz, he also campaigned within the National Federation of Deportees, Internees, Resisters and Patriots, of which he became president-delegate in the 90s, and within the Foundation for the Memory of the Deportation. He also testifies in the 1960s in many schools in France, Germany, Austria and Spain. Again last year, he spoke in English for the BBC. In 1999, he published a precise account of his deportation, based on notes taken shortly after his return.
Maurice Cling Credit: Daniel Cling
Two of his sons, Daniel and Pascal Cling, show him in the documentaries they make,
Maurice Cling was made a knight of the Legion of Honor and an officer of the Academic Palms.
The Shoah Memorial pays tribute to the memory of a survivor who has become a demanding activist and fervent supporter of the memory of deportation.
Our thoughts are with his sons, family and loved ones, to whom we extend our sincere condolences.
