Paul Niedermann, child of Izieu, died on December 7, 2018

Photo House of Izieu / Henry Alexander

In 1942, helped by the Zlatin couple, Paul Niederman was taken to shelter at Palavas-les-Flots, then Lodève. He joined the "Refugee Children’s Colony of the Hérault" in Izieu in May 1943. For one year, the colony of Izieu will take in 105 Jewish children.

In September 1943, Paul left the colony to go into hiding in Switzerland. Sixteen years old, the young boy began to arouse suspicions about the colony and a benevolent gendarme had alerted Miron Zlatin. He thus escaped the roundup of 6 April 1944 during which 44 children and 7 educators were arrested by order of the Gestapo of Lyon, headed by Klaus Barbie.  These will be taken to the Drancy camp, before being deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau for the majority.

Paul Niedermann had testified during the Klaus Barbie trial in France in 1987. He had returned to settle in France after the war, and subsequently often testified to his past as a Jewish child persecuted in France and Germany.

All our thoughts are with his loved ones today.

The House of Izieu pays tribute to him with this excerpt from his testimony left during his stay in Izieu:

«For me, this house in Izieu looked like a haven of peace, because we were really far from the world, we didn’t see anyone, except some peasants from the hamlet next door. Théo laughed a lot. I had relatively little contact, especially with the children. On the other hand, what stays in my mind all the time is in the evening, on the stairs, in front of the house, around the fountain and on the famous terrace, where so many photos were taken. We were talking about the post-war period, where we would meet, what we wanted to do. I would say that I saw relatively little of Mrs. Zlatin herself because, at that time, she moved a lot for the needs of the cause. I was much more in contact with her husband. He was truly a very kind man, and I think he was of great kindness and enormous physical strength. I met there Paulette Paillarès, who had come during her holidays. She was a high school student, one year older than me, and had come to spend her holidays in Izieu precisely to help the monitors with the little ones. I had rather contacts with Paulette, with Henry, with Arnold and Théo, and we were the big ones, we were a group apart.
I also remember at least twice in the summer, swimming in the Rhône with Léon Reifman, where you had to go down for miles through the fields and we arrived and... my faith, he had to spot places because the Rhône, in some places, it’s quite dangerous, there are holes, there’s eddies and he had to, I suppose, spot it very carefully because, well, nothing ever happened. In the instructors, no one spoke German or even Yiddish, and no one wanted to speak it; they wanted us to speak French. And it was good.
We sometimes talked about our families, and then it was much more painful because I knew from a Polish friend, since January 1943, that people had been deported to Poland and were being killed there. I didn’t know how or where, I had never heard of Auschwitz or the gas chamber or the crematory oven, but I knew they were killing and I knew that I would not see my parents again, that there was hardly any chance.”

Source: Testimony of Paul Niedermann on the House of Izieu, transcription of the soundtrack "Les voix d'Izieu" played in the house.

Discover the books of Paul Nierdermann on our online bookstore

Listen again to the testimony of Paul Niedermann on France Culture