Elie Buzyn, one of the last great French witnesses to Auschwitz, has died

Elie Buzyn one of the last great French witnesses to

Elie Buzyn, father of former French Minister of Health Agnès Buzyn, died Monday May 23 at the age of 93. During his life, he worked to transmit the memory of the Shoah, of which he was a witness, arrested at the age of 15 in Poland, before being deported with his family, who never returned, then to rebuild in France.

Elie Buzyn had his deportee tattoo surgically removed, and justified his gesture by explaining: “ You can’t live if you live with it every day. »

Of Polish origin, this survivor of the Auschwitz camp had been arrested at the age of 15, in the Jewish ghetto of Łódź, where his family was then parked, like so many others.

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His parents will succumb in the gas chambers. But the teenager will survive the death marches, these convoys of prisoners leaving the concentration camps.

In 1956, he moved to France and became an orthopedic surgeon. He marries Etty, a renowned psychoanalyst, specialist in early childhood.

For a long time, like many camp survivors, Elie Buzyn was silent and did not want to return to Auschwitz. But one day, he understands that he must testify.

Subsequently, he worked tirelessly to transmit the memory of the Shoah. From then on, he considered it “a duty” to testify in schools and at Auschwitz, with the groups led each year by the chief rabbi of France, Haïm Korsia.

Elie Buzyn was convinced that all those he had helped to approach the horror of the camps would in turn become witnesses to witnesses.

“Survivor of the Holocaust, he testified tirelessly and until his last days of the unspeakable. His memory will live, ”wrote on Twitter the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron.

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