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 civil status), 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 years old, Marie is arrested on July 24, 1944, following a denunciation, in the courtyard of her building where she had passed by again. She is interned at the Caffarelli barracks.
Marie is deported by the convoy that left Toulouse on July 30, 1944, bound for the camp of Ravensbrück for the women and Buchenwald for the men. Her serial number is 49595. She was transferred in January 1945 to the camp of Bergen-Belsen. She was liberated on April 15, 1945 by the British army. Marie was repatriated at the end of May 1945 to Paris 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 Seule à quatorze ans in Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen at Le Manuscrit/ Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah in 2014, then Il y aura bientôt personne, published in 2024 by Grasset.
Marie Vaislic is a knight of the Legion of Honor and commander of the Palmes académiques, a decoration that was presented to her in Toulouse on January 25.
The Shoah Memorial pays tribute to the memory of Marie Vaislic who, after 60 years of silence, tirelessly bore witness to her journey through deportation and becomes 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 family.
