Tuesday, February 23, 2016, the director of the Shoah Memorial Jacques Fredj and historian Serge Klarsfeld met at the Haute-Garonne Departmental Council to receive the original Journal de Marise Crémieux-Hurstel, a Jewish teenager hiding with part of her family in France during the Holocaust.
Nicole Zimmermann, journalist and author, was the first to hold in her hands the Journal intime de sa belle-mère, Marise Crémieux-Hurstel. She then decided to make a copy of it for each of her descendants and to publish it a few months ago ("Journal d'une adolescente juive sous l'Occupation", in the Privat editions).
It was in 1943 that Marise began to tell this new paper confidant about her family’s life, her days with her mother, grandmother, and sister in Vichy France, her moves and school changes, her identity, and above all, her fear of being arrested, denounced, the one who will never leave her and who continues to live there at 90 today.
At the end of the war, his father who had been arrested and deported to Poland will not return. The family will eventually learn that he died in Sobibor, a German extermination camp located on the Polish-Ukrainian border.
Le Journal de Marise Crémieux-Hurstel has now joined the 40 million or so archival documents held at the Shoah Memorial. "These are our only weapons to oppose those who in 50 years, 100 years, will try to mislead our history" specified Jacques Fredj. This Journal, like many testimonies archived at the Memorial Documentation Center is a new stone brought to the reconstruction of the history of the Shoah.
