Madeleine Elbogen

Origins and early life

Madeleine Elbogen, born Madeleine Klein at Mulhouse on 19 October 1922, was a science student at the University of Strasbourg, which had been evacuated to Clermont-Ferrand after the annexation of Alsace by the Reich.

Work and career

On 5 July 1943 she married André Elbogen, a fellow student and a fighter of the Armée juive, the Jewish resistance organisation. She was arrested in the great roundup of 25 November 1943 at Clermont-Ferrand, when the Gestapo seized students and staff of the exiled university in their lecture rooms. She was deported to Auschwitz on 20 January 1944 and murdered on arrival; she had not yet reached her twenty-second birthday, and she was killed because she was Jewish.

Her husband, who did not know that she was already dead, was shot near Saint-Étienne in July of the same year. Her name is inscribed with his on the memorial plaque of the University of Strasbourg to the members of the university killed between 1939 and 1945, and the two names stand side by side there as they did in life.