Raymond-Raoul Lambert

Origins and early life

Raymond-Raoul Lambert was born at Montmorency on 10 August 1894, a French Jew of the republican generation that believed the emancipation of 1791 had settled the question.

Work and career

He directed L'Univers israélite, the main French Jewish weekly, and from the 1930s presided over the committee for assistance to refugees, receiving the Jews driven out of Germany and central Europe when the French state would not. Under the Occupation he headed the UGIF in the southern zone, the single Jewish organisation imposed by Vichy, and what he did there is argued over to this day: the body he ran fed, sheltered and treated tens of thousands, and it also kept the lists and the children's homes that the persecutors used.

He wrote it all down as it happened, and his diary, Carnet d'un témoin 1940-1943, published by Fayard in 1984, is one of the essential French documents of those years — the record of a man watching his own country dismantle him by decree. He was arrested at Marseille on 21 August 1943 after refusing to comply further, and deported to Auschwitz by convoy 64 from Drancy on 7 December 1943, together with his wife Simone and their four children, Lionel aged fourteen, Marc eleven, Tony four and Marie one. None of them returned.