Tribute to Milo Adoner, deceased on 4 March 2020
Milo Adoner, survivor of the Holocaust and tireless witness, passed away at the age of 94
Photo of Milo Adoner by Rudy Waks
Charlotte, Salomon, Rebecca, Milo and Henri Adoner. France, 1930 Photo: Mémorial de la Shoah / Coll. Milo Adoner
Born in 1925, Samuel Emile, known as Milo Adoner is the 4th child of a large family of seven children. His Jewish-Polish family originally from Warsaw emigrated to France during the interwar period, his father is a leather craftsman working from home.
Very attached to the neighborhood where he grew up, he had been enrolled at the school of the rue des Hospitalières Saint-Gervais in the 1930s, obtaining his certificate of studies "with honors" in 1937.
Milo was 17 years old when he was arrested at home in Paris on September 23, 1942, with his family and 112 Jews living at 10-12 rue des Deux-Ponts in the Ile Saint-Louis district. One of her sisters escapes the raid. The family is taken to the camp of Drancy and deported a few days later by the convoy n°38 (September 28, 1942).
The convoy stops at Kosel, a few kilometers from Auschwitz, where Milo is separated from his family. His parents and four siblings go directly to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp where they are murdered. Selected with his brother Salomon for forced labor, Milo is tattooed with number B10602.
He then knew the camps of Birkenau, Blechhammer, Monowitz (Auschwitz III) which he evacuated on January 18, 1945 by a Death March to the camp of Gross Rosen; Eleven days of cold and snow to which Salomon did not survive. He is transferred to the camp of Buchenwald then to Niederkirch. He escapes on April 4, 1945 and is released on April 11. Repatriated with French prisoners of war on April 30, 1942, his deportation lasted 982 days.
«We knew we were doomed. Death was following us. The ovens were humming in overdrive. Nevertheless, we were holding on. The will to live.»
Upon his return to Paris, he found the family apartment "occupied". But his sister Charlotte, the only one of the seven Adoner children to have escaped the big raids, is alive: she took refuge in Marseille for the rest of the war.
He marries Suzy, daughter of a deportee, with whom he will start a family. Milo Adoner was a tireless witness, he did not stop testifying, even if the evocation of his family’s fate remained very painful for him. He published his testimony in a collective work: Les derniers témoins, paroles de déportés recueillis par Jean-Pierre Allali, éditions Safed 2004.
He was Vice-President of the Amicale des déportées de Blechhammer, then its President in 2000. After the absorption of this association by the Amicale d'Auschwitz which became the Union des Déportés d'Auschwitz (UDA) in 2004, he became one of the vice-presidents of the UDA. He was also very involved within the community of the Place des Vosges alongside Rabbi Liché, then Chief Rabbi Olivier Kaufmann
In 1990, he will obtain that Joseph Migneret, the director of the school in the rue des hospitalières Saint Gervais who had been his teacher, be recognized as Just among the nations for having hidden a Jewish family in his apartment for a year and a half. In 2019, at its initiative, the Paris City Hall names the forecourt of this school "The forecourt of the 260 children".
In 2016, on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the discovery of the camps, Milo Adoner was among the 29 recipients of the special promotion "Memories of the deportation" having received the Legion of Honor.
Addy Fuchs and Milo Adoner receiving the Legion of Honor in 2016
With President François Hollande, on 27 January 2015, at the Children’s Memorial, on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the discovery of the camps.
With President François Hollande, on 27 January 2015, at the Children’s Memorial, on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the discovery of the camps. François Hollande meets the Ambassadors of Memory and talks at length with Milo Adoner. Video Memorial of the Shoah.
With Milo Adoner, it is a great figure who is disappearing, a figure of the Pletzl, a memory activist very attached to the Shoah Memorial who has left us. All our thoughts go to his wife Suzy, to his two daughters Arlette and Laura, to all his family and loved ones.
His funeral, conducted by Chief Rabbi Olivier Kaufmann, will take place at the cemetery of Bagneux on Friday, March 6 at 1 p.m.
