the Memorial greets the memory of Benjamin Orenstein who died on February 10, 2021

Credit: photo taken during a trip to Auschwitz that the Memorial organized in 2013, © Shoah Memorial

Benjamin Orenstein, survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, and Honorary President of the Amicale des Anciens Déportés d'Auschwitz-Birkenau et des camps de Haute-Silésie du Rhône, passed away on Wednesday 10 February 2021.

Benjamin Orenstein was born on September 15, 1926, in the city of Annopol in Poland. He is the youngest of five children. His parents live from the egg and veal meat trade.

In 1941, it is forbidden for Jews to move more than a kilometer from the center of Annopol. Men are employed in German companies located on the outskirts of the city. When he was not yet fifteen years old, Benjamin Orenstein took the place of his father who had been arrested and sent to the Ieniszow labor camp. He manages to escape after five weeks, joins his family and goes to work on a farm.

On October 13, 1942, the Jews of Annopol were deported to the killing center of Belzec, with the exception of a group of about one hundred men, including Benjamin and his three brothers, who were taken to the Rachow camp to carry out agricultural work. In 1943, he was transferred to Budzyn, where he worked in an aviation factory. In November, he learns that all the prisoners of Rachow, including his three brothers, have been executed.

In May 1944, as the Soviet troops approached, the detainees from Budzyn were sent to the Ostrowiec camp, then to the Auschwitz camp where Benjamin arrived on 4 August. He is registered and tattooed with registration number B 4416. He is transferred to Fürstengrube, a satellite camp of Auschwitz III, where he works in a coal mine until 13 January 1945. After the «death march», he fails at Dora’s camp, where he falls seriously ill. He is finally released by the US army on April 11, 1945.

Benjamin Orenstein is then 18 and a half years old. He no longer has a family, weighs 32 kilos. After a period of convalescence in a center of the Jewish Agency in Trevano, Switzerland, he manages to reach Palestine and spends some months at the kibbutz of Aloumot, in the Jordan Valley. He joined the army from the creation of the State of Israel in May 1948 and participated in the first Israeli-Arab conflict. Demobilized in 1950, he joins a cousin who lives in France and settles permanently in Lyon in November 1951.

Following the trial of Klaus Barbie in Lyon in 1987, he decides to testify and will commit himself with determination for the transmission of the memory of the Shoah, in France but also by accompanying study trips on the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Benjamin Orenstein presided over the Amicale of Former Deportees from Auschwitz-Birkenau and the camps in Upper Silesia on the Rhone for many years. The newspaper Le Monde dedicated a portrait to him on May 8, 2020. Benjamin had published his testimony Ces mots pour sépulture in 2006.

Benjamin Orenstein was made a knight of the Legion of Honor in 2015 and a commander of the Palmes académiques in 2018.

The Shoah Memorial salutes the memory of this ardent activist and offers its sincere condolences to his children and grandchildren.