Tribute to Milo Adoner, who died on March 4, 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: Memorial de la Shoah / Coll. Milo Adoner
Born in 1925, Samuel Emile, aka Milo Adoner is the 4th child of a large family of seven children. His Polish-Jewish family from Warsaw emigrated to France during the inter-war period; his father is a leather craftsman, working at home.
Very attached to the neighbourhood where he grew up, he had been educated at the school on rue des Hospitalières Saint-Gervais in the 1930s, obtaining his certificate of studies «with distinction» in 1937.
Milo is 17 years old when he is arrested at his home in Paris on 23 September 1942, with his family and 112 Jews living at 10-12 rue des Deux-Ponts in the district of Ile Saint-Louis. One of her sisters escapes the scoop. The family is taken to the Drancy camp and deported a few days later by convoy 38 (28 September 1942).
The convoy stops at Kosel, a few kilometres 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 number B10602.
He then experienced the camps of Birkenau, Blechhammer, Monowitz (Auschwitz III) which he evacuated on 18 January 1945 by a Death March to the camp of Gross Rosen; Eleven days of cold and snow to which Solomon did not survive. He is transferred to the Buchenwald camp and then to Niederkirch. He escapes on 4 April 1945 and is released on 11 April. Repatriated with French prisoners of war on 30 April 1942, his deportation lasted 982 days.
"We knew we were doomed. Death was upon us. The ovens were roaring. Nevertheless, we held on. The will to live."
On his return to Paris, he finds 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 has taken refuge in Marseille during the rest of the war.
He marries Suzy, daughter of a deportee, with whom he will found a family. Milo Adoner was a tireless witness, he never stopped testifying, even if the evocation of his family’s fate remained very painful for him. He published his testimony in a collective book: Les derniers témoins, paroles de déportés recueillies par Jean-Pierre Allali, éditions Safed 2004.
He was Vice-President of the Association of Deportees of Blechhammer and 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 in the community of Place des Vosges alongside Rabbi Liché, then the great Rabbi Olivier Kaufmann
In 1990, he obtained that Joseph Migneret, the director of the school of the Rue des Hospitalières Saint Gervais who had been his teacher was recognized among the nations for having hidden a Jewish family in his apartment for a year and a half . In 2019, on its initiative, the Paris City Hall named the forecourt of this school «The forecourt of 260 children».
In 2016, on the occasion of 70th anniversary of the discovery of the camps, Milo Adoner was one of the 29 recipients of the special promotion «Mémoires de la déportation» received the Legion of Honour.
Addy Fuchs and Milo Adoner receive 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 has a long conversation with Milo Adoner. Video Memorial de la Shoah.
With Milo Adoner, it is a great figure who disappears, a figure of the Pletzl, an activist of the memory very attached to the Memorial of the Shoah that left us. Our thoughts are with his wife, Suzy, his two daughters, Arlette and Laura, his family and loved ones.
His funeral, led by the Grand Rabbi Olivier Kaufmann, will take place at the cemetery of Bagneux on Friday 6 March at 1 pm.
