Paulette Sarcey, born Szlifke, a survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, died on Monday, May 4 in Montreuil.
Photo: Paulette Sarcey, 1947 Credit of the photo: Mémorial de la Shoah / coll. Sarcey
Paulette was born on April 11, 1924, in Paris to Polish Jewish parents who had just arrived in France. His brother Robert comes to enlarge the family in 1934. The family lives in the 20th arrondissement of Paris. Paulette frequents the patronage stemming from the progressive Jewish movement close to the MOI.
In 1940 at the age of 16, she joined the Communist Youth and took her first steps in the Resistance alongside Henri Krasucki and Marcel Rayman. Warned of the imminence of the Vel d'hiv roundup, Paulette has time to warn her parents to take cover and to take her brother to the countryside.
Paulette continued her activities in the Resistance until May 1943 when she was arrested following a raid by the Special Brigades of the Police Prefecture with many comrades. Incarcerated at the small depot of the Police Prefecture, assaulted during her interrogation, Paulette is transferred to the Rothschild hospital where a complaisant doctor declares that she needs urgent surgery.
As soon as she is recovered, Paulette is transferred to the Drancy camp where she finds her comrades. All were deported by convoy 55 on June 23, 1943, to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Paulette received registration number 46650.
After quarantine, she was first assigned to the Aussenkommando before being transferred to the Kanada-II and into various kommandos. At the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, she liaises between her group from the Parisian communist Jews and that led by Marie-Claude Vaillant Couturier.
During the death marches in January 1945, she was evacuated to the camps of Ravensbrück then Neustadt-Glewe where she was liberated on May 2, 1945.
Upon her return to Paris in June 1945, Paulette finds her parents and her brother Robert, who survived hidden all the duration of the war. In 1947, she married Max Swiczarczyk-Sarcey, a comrade met at the patronage and active resistance within the FTP MOI.
Paulette Sarcey was Knight of the Legion of Honor and decorated with the Military Medal.
The Shoah Memorial offers its sincere condolences to Michelle and Claude Sarcey, her children, and their family, and salutes the memory of a tireless activist within the Association of Former Deported Jews of France alongside Henry Bulawko, UJRE and MRJ-MOI.
The story of Paulette is told in the book published in 2015, Paula, obstinately surviving at Tallandier.
