Marie Rafalowitch was born on June 11, 1930 in Toulouse. She is the daughter of Abram Rafalowitch and Malka née Kurnenz, both from Poland. After an attempt to settle in Mandatory Palestine, the couple joined Toulouse in the mid-1920s. She is the sister of Jacki (François for the civil registry), born in 1928. The couple and the Rafalowitch children live at 4 rue Sainte-Catherine in Toulouse. In June 1944, the family left their home to sleep outside for safety. Aged 14, Marie was arrested on July 24, 1944, following a denunciation, in the courtyard of her building where she had passed by. She is interned at the Caffarelli barracks.
Marie was deported by the convoy that left Toulouse on 30 July 1944 for the women’s camp at Ravensbrück and the men’s camp at Buchenwald. Her registration number is 49595. She was transferred in January 1945 to the Bergen-Belsen camp. She was released on 15 April 1945 by the British army. Marie was repatriated to Paris at the end of May 1945 and reunited with her family.
In 1951, Marie married Jean Vaislic, a survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. They had two children, Claude Daniel born in 1952 and Alain Marc born in 1966.
Marie Vaislic published
Marie Vaislic is knight of the Legion of Honor and commander of the Academic Palms, a decoration that was presented to her in Toulouse on 25 January.
The Shoah Memorial salutes the memory of Marie Vaislic who, after 60 years of silence, tirelessly testified to her journey in deportation and became a figure in the memory of the Shoah in Occitania and beyond, alongside her husband Jean, who died in 2022. The Shoah Memorial offers its condolences to his sons and their families.
