Portrait of Paul Schaffer, 1930-1940, without place.passed away today at the age of 95. Deported at the age of 16 and survivor of convoy 28, Paul Schaffer, worked all his life for the transmission of the memory of the Shoah. At the Memorial, to which he was very attached, he came very often to participate in conferences or ceremonies. He also came to testify, especially in front of schools.
It was at the request of the students to whom he was testifying that Paul Schaffer decided to tell his story in a moving and authentic book entitled
Officer of the Legion of Honor, honorary citizen of the town of
Born and raised in Vienna, Paul Schaffer had a happy childhood surrounded by his sister, parents and grandmother. His life changed suddenly with the occupation of Vienna by the Nazis and the annexation of Austria. He discovers the humiliations, the persecutions and goes into exile a first time with his family in Belgium.
In May 1940, the Germans attacked France through Belgium and Holland. The Schaffer family decided to leave Brussels and went to Revel, a village in southwest France, not far from Toulouse. Life is gradually getting organized: Paul, who no longer goes to school, takes care of gardening, does various domestic chores and learns the trade of cabinetmaker.
At the end of 1940, the Schaffers were "invited" to join "a family camp", the internment camp of Agde, mainly composed of Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria. A family friend, resident of Revel, used her influence with the prefecture, allowing the family to leave the camp and be assigned house arrest. The Schaffers, who had little information, did not seek to leave France and were unaware of their fate.
Following the roundup of the Vel d'Hiv', the Germans put pressure on Laval, then head of the Vichy government, to add foreign Jews from the southern zone to the list of deportations. This is how Paul was arrested on 26 August 1942. On the walls of the camp at Drancy, where he stayed for a few days, he noted several inscriptions engraved by deportees who would mark him forever: "When there is nothing left to hope for, that’s when one must not despair" and another tragic assertion "One enters, one cries out and that’s life; one cries out and that’s death."
On 4 September 1942, by convoy 28, Paul was deported to Auschwitz with his mother and sister who were gassed as soon as they arrived. He escaped this fate: he was interned in two forced labor camps, satellites of Auschwitz: Tarnovitz, then Schoppinitz, before joining Birkenau in November 1943.
After an unbearable six-month stay, Paul is transferred to the site of Bobrek, where the company Siemens, taking advantage of cheap labor, has a factory built by deportees. The conditions there are much less painful than in Birkenau. In Bobrek, Paul meets Simone Veil (Jacob), his sister and his mother. They will meet again after the war in Paris and form unbreakable friendships.
In January 1945, the "death march" took him to the camp of Gleiwitz. He was then transported to the west in an open wagon, but managed to jump off the train with a friend and after a few days joined the German-Soviet front. While waiting to be repatriated to France by the French army, Paul and his friend will stay in Krakow until April 1945, happy to be free again.
Once in France, Paul returns to Revel, the place of his arrest. There he learns of his father’s death and discovers what happened during the war. After two months, he left Revel for Toulouse where he began to work. He obtained a scholarship and resumed his studies in 1945. First an electronics engineer, he then began a brilliant career as an industrialist, after being a teacher in a Jewish school of the ORT (Organization, Reconstruction, Work).
Testimony of Paul Schaffer in the auditorium of the Shoah Memorial, in November 2018:
