After joining the maquis in February 1944, he freed Guéret, then was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo. Jew and resistant, he is sent to Buchenwald in one of the last convoys. He died on January 28, at the age of 98 years.
by Benoît Hopquin
In Buchenwald, to feel nevertheless a human being, Jacques Bloch, Matricule 85235, wrote poems on tiny pieces of paper chiped in the Nazi administration. In one of them, he compared his fate of deportee to that of a suspension point.
At the beginning of 1945, this metaphor applied fairly well to the prisoner’s situation, plunged into a feverish expectation. The allies approached slowly and the conditions were made each week more intolerable in the concentration camp. Who would arrive first, armies of the liberator or the exhaustion of the bodies?
Men were in fact suspension points, stuck in the frail interstice between life and death. “The people who lost hope collapsed and disappeared in a few days,” said Jacques Bloch, seven decades later, seated in front of a small iron box holding easily in a pocket. It was tight a piece of fabric with its serial number and some trophies, as derisory as poignant, brought back from Germany.
Jacques Bloch, who died on Saturday January 28, at the age of 98, in Paris, had also kept the red triangle of political deportees marked with “F” of his nationality. Jew and resistant, doubly hateful in the eyes of the Nazis, he had been arrested in Guéret under his surname of Maquisard, Jacques Binet, farmer in Creuse. To be taken under a false identity left him a meager chance to survive.
precarious situation
He was born in Paris on July 7, 1924, from a family from Alsace-Lorraine who, to remain French, had fled his territories after the defeat of 1870. His mother, Germaine, had lost two brothers in the trenches. His father, Marc-André, was himself a soldier of the Great War. Having become an associate professor at the Lakanal high school, in Sceaux, he was recalled in 1940, taken prisoner and then released from the stalag. But, back in France, he had been struck off from the administration under new Jewish laws, then expelled from his house required by the occupier.
The situation becoming ever more precarious in the Paris region, the family takes refuge in a village in Indre-et-Loire. Warned by the country guard of her imminent arrest, she fled hastily, crossed the line of demarcation in early 1942 and hides in Genouillac, a commune in the Creuse where the population will ensure it silent protection until the end of the conflict.
But Jacques wants to fight. He joined the maquis in February 1944, helped by a cousin of his father, Marc Bloch, the co -founder of the Annals, a great historian and great resistant executed by the Germans a few months later. Within the first Franche FFI company in Creuse, the one who became Jacques Binet released Guéret in the aftermath of the landing, on June 7, 1944. In the fighting, he was seriously injured in the arm by a burst of machine gun and must be ampute .
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