The Frenchman had participated in the evacuation of the German concentration camp of Buchenwald, in 1945. He died on Saturday, December 26, at the age of 96.
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Raymond Savoyat, who has just died, Saturday, December 26, near Grenoble, at the age of 96 years, has long kept for himself these days of mid -April 1945. It was a painful memory, which he preferred to smother in a silence woven of despair, incomprehension and modesty. It took the persuasion of his grandchildren for him to finally recount, late in the day, with tears coming to his eyes each time, this moment of history that he had lived: the evacuation of the Buchenwald camp. /
Resistant, then engaged in the American army within the III e army of General Patton, the young platoon leader had been ordered to confuse twenty-five military trucks to a place whose name was not on any map, located near the city of Weimar. After looking, Raymond Savoyat finally finds this mysterious camp where he has to take care of prisoners, crosses the gate and park his Fords on the main call plaza.
“I then saw coming towards us the deportees. They were rags that dragged themselves, a horde of walking corpses. They were all haggard. There was a guy that two of his friends were carrying so that he wouldn’t fall. It was unimaginable, “describes -il to the World in July 2019. “No one could climb alone [the rim of the truck was 1.10 m high]. We had to carry them. It was not very difficult. They hardly weighed more than 35- 40 kg. I took a man in my arms. His bones cracked and the guy started screaming. “
Multiplication of symbolic gestures
Raymond Savoyat says that the operation is done without a word:
“There was the language barrier, of course, but even the French did not speak. I think they had dreamed so much of this moment of theirrelease that they were afraid to wake up. They were living a dream. We were living a nightmare. “
Bodies have been malnourished for too long to withstand the effects of normal food.” We were prohibited from feeding them. I have seen men fighting for a piece of bread. “Raymond Savoyat discovers the interior of the camp, shrouded in a stench long lasting in his memory, the barracks where the deportees were piled up on bedsteads, the buildings of the crematoriums. He is 20 years old.
He had just turned 16 when the Germans entered the Tour-du-Pin (Isère), where he lived in 1940. His father had a small transport company, his mother ran a café.The family was not politicized. Very quickly revolted by the defeat, the young man with the build of a rugby player multiplies symbolic gestures. “It was ridiculous, but I needed to do something. “
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