The House of Izieu, opened by Sabine and Miron Zlatin in the Ain, welcomed more than a hundred Jewish children between 1943 and 1944.
The children of the house of Izieu, 1943. Memorial of the Shoah/ Coll. OSE
On the morning of April 6, 1944, the 44 children and seven educators who were there were rounded up and deported by order of Klaus Barbie, head of the Gestapo of Lyon. With the exception of two teenagers and Miron Zlatin, deported in convoy 73 to the Baltic countries and murdered at Reval (now Tallinn) in Estonia, the group was deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Only one adult, Léa Feldblum, survives. All the others were murdered upon their arrival.
Hunted down and brought back to France by Beate and Serge Klarsfeld helped by Fortunée Benguigui and Ita-Rosa Halaunbrenner, mothers of children bought in Izieu, Klaus Barbie is presented before the French justice in 1987 in Lyon. During the instruction, Serge Klarsfeld finds in the archives of the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation (CDJC), the Barbie telex reporting on the deportation of forty-four children.
Karen Taieb, Head of Archives at the Shoah Memorial, explains to us in a video what the telex of Izieu is:
This document is one of the main pieces of evidence that will allow Klaus Barbie to be convicted for crimes against humanity:
This trial definitively anchors the roundup of Izieu in the French memorial landscape.
The day after this trial, in March 1988, the association of "Musée-Mémorial des enfants d'Izieu" was formed around Sabine Zlatin. A place of memory, education and life, the Izieu House Memorial was inaugurated in 1994 by the President of the Republic François Mitterrand, in the presence of Sabine Zlatin, who was not in Izieu on the day of the raid.
The children of the house of Izieu, 1943. Memorial of the Shoah/ Coll. OSE
