Paul Velsa

Origins and early life

Paul Velsa, born Paul Isaac Welsa in the twelfth arrondissement of Paris on 29 December 1905 to parents of Polish origin, was a French actor whose name is inscribed on the Wall of Names at the Memorial of the Shoah in Paris.

Work and career

He first walked on to a stage in February 1923, at seventeen, at the Théâtre des Ternes, and made his screen debut in 1928 as the corporal Bourrache in Jean Renoir's Tire-au-flanc. He worked in the theatre and the cinema for some fifteen years, until the outbreak of the war put an end to his career. He was a victim of the anti-Jewish laws of the Vichy government, which barred Jews from the stage and the screen and then from ordinary life.

He was arrested shortly after the death of his father on 19 January 1944, held at the camp of Drancy from 4 May 1944, and deported on 15 May 1944 by convoy 73, the transport that went not to Poland but to Kaunas in Lithuania and Reval in Estonia, and from which almost no one came back. His death is recorded as 20 May 1944, and the civil register names Auschwitz. He was thirty-eight years old.