Tribute to Milo Adoner, who died on 4 March 2020

Charlotte, Salomon, Rebecca, Milo and Henri Adoner. France, 1930 Photo: Shoah Memorial / Milo Adoner Collection

Born in 1925, Samuel Emile, aka Milo Adoner is the 4^th child of a large family of seven children. His Jewish-Polish family from Warsaw emigrated to France during the interwar period; his father was a leather craftsman, working from home.

Very attached to the neighborhood where he grew up, he had been educated at the school of the rue des Hospitalières Saint-Gervais in the 1930s, obtaining in 1937 his certificate of studies "with honors".

Milo was 17 years old when he was 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 roundup. The family was taken to Drancy camp and deported a few days later by convoy no. 38 (28 September 1942).

The convoy stops at Kosel, a few kilometers from Auschwitz, where Milo is separated from his family. His parents and four siblings went directly to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp where they were murdered. Selected with his brother Salomon for forced labor, Milo is tattooed with number B10602.

He then lived in the camps of Birkenau, Blechhammer, and 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 from which Salomon did not survive. He was transferred to the Buchenwald camp and then to Niederkirch. He escaped on 4 April 1945 and was 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 on our heels. The ovens were rattling away. Nevertheless, we held on. The will to live."

On 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 great roundups, 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 d'déportés recueillies 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 in the community of Place des Vosges alongside Rabbi Liché, then Grand Rabbi Olivier Kaufmann

In 1990, he obtained that Joseph Migneret, the director of the school on the rue des hospitalières Saint Gervais who had been its teacher, be recognized as Juste parmi les nations for having hidden a Jewish family in his apartment for a year and a half. In 2019, at its initiative, the Paris City Council named the forecourt of this school "The forecourt of 260 children".

In 2016, on the occasion of the 70^th anniversary of the discovery of the camps, Milo Adoner was among the 29 recipients of the special "Memories of the Deportation" promotion 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 has a long conversation with Milo Adoner. Video Memorial of the Shoah.

With Milo Adoner, it is a great figure who disappears, a figure of the Pletzl, an activist of memory very attached to the Shoah Memorial who has passed away. Our thoughts are with his wife Suzy, his two daughters Arlette and Laura, all his family and loved ones.

His funeral, conducted by the Chief Rabbi Olivier Kaufmann, will take place at the cemetery of Bagneux on Friday 6 March at 1 p.m.