Suzanne-Lucienne Rabinovici

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The last witnesses , Burgtheater Vienna 2015

Suzanne-Lucienne Rabinovici , also Schoschana Rabinovici (born on November 14, 1932 in Paris as Suzanne-Lucienne Weksler ; died on August 2, 2019 in Tel Aviv ), was a survivor of the Shoah and a contemporary witness .

Life

In 1937 she moved with her parents to their hometown Vilna . The city belonged to Poland at the time, was occupied by Lithuania in 1939 , the Soviet Union in 1940 and was under German occupation from 1941 . On the day the city was taken by German troops - in July 1941 - the father was arrested, taken to Ponar and shortly afterwards killed together with another five thousand Polish Jews; the family was driven into the Vilna ghetto .

The ghetto was "liquidated" in 1943, which meant the deportation of all remaining residents. A selection was made : those able to work were sent to the right, those unable to work, mainly children and the elderly, to the left. These were immediately sent to extermination camps .

At eleven, Suzanne was far too young to have any chance of survival in the selection process. Nevertheless, her mother managed to get her to the right side. Mother and daughter were taken together to the Kaiserwald concentration camp in Riga and from there to the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig in 1944 . Since the girl was still too small and unsuitable for forced labor , she had to hide again and again. Her mother used cunning to make her look older. Despite this, Suzanne experienced physical agony, deprivation and psychological terror and witnessed abuse and murder. Exhaustion and fever, constant vomiting and open wounds led to life-threatening illnesses. In February 1945 mother and daughter were sent on an eleven-day death march , but survived this too, if only barely, and were liberated by the Red Army in Tauentzin at the end of March 1945 . At this point, mother and daughter were emaciated to the skeleton. Suzanne was in a coma for a week. Of more than thirty family members, only her uncle Volodya survived - besides the two of them .

In 1950 the mother and daughter emigrated to Israel . Suzanne married David Rabinovici , gave birth to two sons (the older one, Aron, born 1955, and Doron , born 1961) and worked as a physiotherapist . In 1964 the family moved to Vienna , in 1994 the book Thanks to My Mother , which she had actually written for her sons and their children, was published as a school edition in Frankfurt / Main . It quickly enjoyed lasting success, particularly in the English edition of Penguin. In 1999 she received the Mildred L. Batchelder Award .

From 2013 she worked in the contemporary witness production The Last Witnesses of the Vienna Burgtheater ; the production was conceived and designed by her son Doron Rabinovici together with Burgtheater director Matthias Hartmann . The piece referred to the November pogroms in 1938 . This production was highly valued by the public and the press, and was invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen and the Dresden State Theater , to Hamburg and Frankfurt.

plant

  • Peṣāʿîm šel-lô higlîdû . Jerusalem: Yad Vashem , 1991
    • Schoschana Rabinovici: Thanks to my mother. A report on the survival of the few in ghetto, concentration camps and on the death march. From the Hebrew by Mirjam Pressler . With a title portrait and some illustrations in the text. Alibaba, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-86042-170-0 / ISBN 3-86042-159-X (school edition).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Anke Dürr: On the death of Schoschana Rabinovici. In: spiegel.de. August 5, 2019, accessed August 5, 2019.
  2. ↑ Schoschana Rabinovici died in Tel Aviv at the age of 86. In: wienerzeitung.at . August 5, 2019, accessed August 5, 2019.
personal data
SURNAME Rabinovici, Suzanne-Lucienne
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rabinovici, Schoschana; Weksler, Suzanne-Lucienne
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian Holocaust witness and author
DATE OF BIRTH November 14, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH 2nd August 2019
Place of death Tel Aviv