Henry Bulawko

Origins and early life

Henry Bulawko was born at Lida, then in Poland and now in Belarus, on 25 November 1918, the son of Shlomo Zalman Bulawko, who became an Orthodox rabbi in Paris; the family arrived in the French capital in 1925, when he was seven, and Yiddish remained his first language.

Work and career

He was arrested at the Père-Lachaise metro station on 18 November 1942, held at Beaune-la-Rolande and Drancy, and deported by convoy 57 from Bobigny on 18 July 1943 to Auschwitz, then sent to forced labour at the Jaworzno coal mine. He escaped from the death march at Blechhammer in January 1945 and reached Marseille on 10 May of that year, one of the few of his convoy to return; his sister Freda did not. He published Les Jeux de la mort et de l'espoir in 1954, one of the earliest French accounts of the camps written by a survivor, at a time when few wanted to read them.

For the rest of his life he presided over the Amicale des déportés d'Auschwitz and the association of former Jewish deportees of France, testified at the trial of Klaus Barbie in 1987, and spoke in schools; at the dedication of the Mémorial de la Shoah in 2005 he said simply that he lived in order to bear witness. He died in Paris on 27 November 2011, two days after his ninety-third birthday.