Maurice Rajsfus

Origins and early life

Maurice Rajsfus was born in the tenth arrondissement of Paris on 9 April 1928 to Polish Jews who had reached France in the early 1920s: his father Nushim Plocki, born at Radom, and his mother Riwka Rajsfus, born at Dembowa; he later wrote under his mother's name.

Work and career

On 16 July 1942 the family was taken in the Vél d'Hiv round-up, carried out by French police; he was fourteen, and he and his sister were let go under an order that spared French children of fourteen to sixteen. Their parents were deported from Drancy to Auschwitz on convoy 11, on 27 July 1942, and did not come back; he spent the rest of his life establishing, document by document, who in France had made that possible.

Without any formal training as a historian he wrote some forty books, among them Des Juifs dans la collaboration on the UGIF, La Police de Vichy, Drancy, un camp de concentration très ordinaire and Jeudi noir on the round-up itself. In 1994 he co-founded the Observatoire des libertés publiques and for twenty years edited its bulletin Que fait la police?, recording close to six thousand cases of police violence. He died at Antony on 13 June 2020, at ninety-two.