Raphaël Esrail

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Raphaël Esrail (born May 10, 1925 in Manisa , Turkey ) is a French survivor of the Holocaust .

Raphaël Esrail (2018)
Event with Raphaël Esrail at Sciences Po University in Paris (2018)

Life

Raphaël Esrail's Ladino -speaking parents moved him to France when he was one year old. As a child, he joined the Jewish scout organization . He attended the École Centrale de Lyon engineering school when Nazi Germany occupied France in 1940 . In 1943 he became a member of a Jewish resistance group in which he was used as a passport forger. In January 1944 he was arrested by the Vichy Police and abused and interrogated by the Gestapo in Montluc Prison . He was transported to the Drancy assembly camp and on February 3 to the Auschwitz concentration campdeported, where he was used for forced labor in the ammunition factory of the Weichsel-Union-Werke . In January 1945 he was transferred on a death march to the Waldlager Ampfing external command of the Dachau concentration camp , which was disbanded on April 25. Esrail was liberated by the US Army near Tutzing on May 1, 1945 .

On his return, he first came to the reception camp set up in the Hôtel Lutetia in Paris and from there returned to Lyon . All of his family members survived the National Socialist persecution of the Jews. His future wife, Liliane Badour, whom he met in Drancy, had also survived the imprisonment in the Birkenau extermination camp and in the Ravensbrück concentration camp . Esrail resumed his engineering training in Lyon and worked from 1948 to 1999 in Lyon as an employee at Gaz de France . He did not want to be reminded of the persecution for many years.

In the mid-1980s he got involved with the Amicale d'Auschwitz and became their honorary secretary. In 2008 he became president of the Union des Déportés d'Auschwitz .

Esrail is Commandeur de la Légion d'Honneur and was honored with his wife by the Federal Republic of Germany with the Federal Cross of Merit in 2013 . Liliane Badour-Esrail died in 2020 at the age of 95.

Fonts

  • Anise Postel-Vinay, Harald Folke, André Rogerie, Raphaël Esrail, Lazare Pytkowicz: La déportation: témoignages et itinéraires de déportés 1942–1945 . Frémeaux & associés, Vincennes, 2000 (audio).
  • L'evacuation d'Auschwitz . In: Historiens et Géographes , March 2005, Volume 97, Issue 389, pp. 45–47.
  • Isabelle Ernot, Raphaël Esrail: Mémoire demain: témoignages de déportés . Union des déportés d'Auschwitz, Paris, 2009 (video).
  • L'espérance d'un baiser: le témoignage de l'un des derniers survivants d'Auschwitz. Robert Laffont, Paris, 2017 ISBN 978-2-221-20221-0 .
    • Raphaël Esrail, Isabelle Ernot: The hope of a kiss: Auschwitz, Liliane and me. Edited by Ulrich Baumann, Sarah Friedrich, Uwe Neumärker. Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, 2019 ISBN 978-3-942240-35-2 (table of contents)

Web links

Commons : Raphaël Esraïl  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ L'Union des Déportés d'Auschwitz. Retrieved January 27, 2021 (French).
  2. ^ Federal Cross of Merit for Liliane and Raphaël Esrail. In: Auschwitz.info . March 22, 2013, accessed January 27, 2021 .
  3. ↑ Auschwitz survivor Liliane Badour-Esrail died. In: Tagesspiegel.de . May 2, 2020, accessed January 27, 2021 .
personal data
SURNAME Esrail, Raphaël
SHORT DESCRIPTION French Holocaust survivor
DATE OF BIRTH May 10, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Manisa , Turkey