Tribute to Maurice Cling, survivor of the Holocaust and committed witness, who died on November 23, 2020
Maurice Cling Credit: Daniel Cling
Maurice Cling was born on May 4, 1929 in Paris, into a Jewish family of Romanian origin. His parents run a tailor-fur shop on Rue Monge in the 5th arrondissement of Paris. Jacques, his father, voluntarily enlisted in 1914 in the French army, and returns decorated with the military medal and the war cross. He was naturalized in 1920. Simone, his mother, was born in France.
When anti-Semitic legislation obliges Jacques at the beginning of the Second World War to put up a poster identifying his shop as a "Jewish company", he sets up a display next to it with his decorations and the inscription "Français, engagé volontaire, blessé de guerre 1914-1918" to denounce this stigmatization. Very popular in the neighborhood, the approach causes a sensation. The next day, an inspector comes to order him to remove it.
Arrested in his class at the Lavoisier school, on the day of his fifteenth birthday, May 4, 1944, Maurice Cling is interned at the camp of Drancy with his brother Willy, aged 17, his mother and father. On 20 May 1944, the whole family was deported to the 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 on with the support of his brother, from whom he is separated during a 'selection' in October and whom he will no longer see again. After various particularly trying kommandos, and a parenthesis at the Kanada Kommando, he becomes at the beginning of the winter a waitboy at the Revier. On several occasions, he is helped by deportees who contribute to saving his life. Maurice is evacuated in January 1945 to the camp of Dachau. Evacuated again in the spring towards Tyrol, he was released on April 29, 1945 by an American unit in Upper Bavaria, while the German guards fled.
Repatriated to France, very weakened, he arrives at the Gare de l'Est in Paris on May 18, 1945 and finds his grandparents, aunt, and cousin who were not deported.
Associate of English, linguist, he teaches at the high school in 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 directs the English department.
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 deputy president 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. Last year again, he spoke in English for the BBC. He published in 1999 a precise account of his deportation, based on notes taken shortly after his return, You who enter here... , A Child in Auschwitz, new edition, ed. of the Atelier/FNDIRP, 2008. The book is published by the Auschwitz Museum in Polish language.
Maurice Cling Credit: Daniel Cling
Two of his sons, Daniel and Pascal Cling, make him testify in the documentaries they are making, Héritages, broadcast by France 3 in October 1998, and Il faut raconter, on Arte in January 2008.
Maurice Cling was made a knight of the Legion of Honor and an officer of the Palmes académiques.
The Shoah Memorial pays tribute to the memory of a survivor who became a demanding activist and fervent in the memory of the deportation.
All our thoughts go to his sons, to his family and loved ones, to whom we extend our sincere condolences.
