Gilbert Bloch

Origins and early life

Gilbert Bloch was born in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris on 20 April 1920; his grandfather was president of the Jewish community of Nancy, and his mother Alice Blondel was deported to Auschwitz.

Work and career

He entered the École polytechnique with the class of 1939 and was expelled from it under the antisemitic laws of Vichy — the state that had trained its engineers without regard to religion since 1794 now removed them by category. He made contact with the Éclaireurs israélites de France at Lyon and then at Grenoble, and in November 1942 took charge of the school at Lautrec in the Tarn, one of the rural workshops where Jewish adolescents were kept alive, taught and hidden until the site had to be dispersed in 1943.

He then took command of the Marc-Haguenau company in the maquis of Vabre, a Jewish fighting unit named after a scout leader who had died in the resistance. He was killed in action on 8 August 1944 at Viane, in the Tarn, during a German attack, at twenty-four, a few weeks before the liberation of the region. A school of Jewish studies founded after the war carries his name.