Resistant and deported, he tirelessly testified from the inhuman episode he has crossed, but also celebrated mutual aid and dignity with younger generations. He died on January 22, at the age of 96.
Le Monde
Resistant and deported, survivor engaged in a mission of knowledge and resilience, Raphaël Esrail died at the Lannion Hospital (Côtes-d’Armor) on January 22 at the age of 96.
If it is born in Turkey, in Manisa – the ancient magnesia of Sipyle – May 10, 1925, in a Jewish family where we speak the Ladino, this Judeo-Romanesque language crosses the old Castilian and The Hebrew, Raphaël Esrail grew up in France, in Lyon, where his own are established in the district of La Croix-Rousse in 1926.
You are very young, he is interested in the walking of the world and, within the Israelite eclairs of France, an association Scoute born in 1923, helps foreign Jews come to fetch in France a refuge against the advent of the Nazism. Engineering student at the Ecole Centrale de Lyon, it leads in 1943 a double life, a serious and resistant student specialized in the manufacture of false papers, under identity, similarly dummy, of Raoul Paul Cabanel, born in Montauban in November 1926.
The time of the test
But, on the way to his clandestine lab, he was arrested on January 8, 1944 by the militia and the Lyonnaise officer of the Gestapo led by Francis André, “twisted mouth”, who torture on behalf of Klaus Barbie. Imprisoned at Fort Montluc, he does not speak, but is identified as Jew and transferred to Drancy on January 25 with fifty coreliners.
There, during the six days he passed in the camp, hub of Vichy’s anti-Semitic policy, he meets Liliane Badour. The young orphan biarrote, one year old his elder, was arrested with his young brothers, Henri and René, the Catholic baptism of the cadet being too recent in view of Vichy to erase the Hebrew origin. Love at first sight is immediate. And, if the four young people go together for the deportation on 3 February by the convoy 67, the fate separates them, Raphaël assigned to forced labor in Auschwitz, while Liliane integrates Birkenau, where his little brothers are gased upon arrival.
The concentrational test, the violence of the body, the humiliation, the challenge of humanity, Raphael keeps everything for him the time of the test, surprised to be still alive when death is everywhere around him. But he knows he is there because he resisted and he must hold because he wants to find Liliane. When it comes to evacuating the camps in front of the progression of the Red Army, he still holds, during the walks of death where we shot those who can no longer move forward, as he survives the trains of death, true ” Rolling tombs “where we parque the inmates of Gross-Rosen, abandoning them without water or food seven days during.
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