Sylvain Kaufmann

Origins and early life

Sylvain Kaufmann was born at Metz on 8 March 1914, a French Jewish businessman who survived the Shoah, and died at Créteil on 14 August 1996 of leukaemia; he is buried in Jerusalem.

Work and career

Arrested in 1943, he passed between March 1943 and May 1945 through Pithiviers, Beaune-la-Rolande, Drancy, Auschwitz, Warsaw and Dachau, which is to say through the whole apparatus, from the French internment camps run by French gendarmes to the German camps at the end. On 25 March 1943 he escaped from convoy 53, which was bound for Sobibor, where almost nobody survived at all; the escape saved the lives of three of his fellow prisoners as well as his own.

He kept the account to himself for forty years and then wrote it: Au-delà de l'enfer in 1987 and Le Livre de la mémoire in 1992, both prefaced by Robert Badinter, who had himself lost his father in the deportation. The books are precise about places, dates and names, which is what such books are for, and they were written by a man who had no literary ambition whatever and simply refused to let the thing be forgotten.