Jean-Raphaël Hirsch

Origins and early life

Jean-Raphaël Hirsch was born in the twentieth arrondissement of Paris on 6 September 1933, son of Sigismond Hirsch, the radiologist and resistance officer who survived Auschwitz, and of Berthe Hirsch, who was murdered at Birkenau in 1943.

Work and career

From the end of 1942 to August 1944, under the alias Nano and the false name Jean-Paul Pelous, he served as a liaison agent for the Jewish resistance in the south-west: he carried messages, papers and money by bicycle between the farms and hiding places, because a child on a bicycle draws no attention. He was not yet eleven in the summer of 1944 when he worked beside a resistance doctor on the battlefield, handing instruments, holding what needed to be held.

He therefore knew, before he had finished being a child, both what men do to each other and what can be done to repair it, and after the war he became a surgeon, a choice he traced directly to those weeks. He spoke publicly in later life about the child he had been and about his mother, and worked for the memory of the Jewish resistance. He was an officer of the Legion of Honour and was made a commander of the Ordre national du Mérite in 2015. He died in the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris on 10 September 2016.