Every page of Ginette Kolinka’s weekly agenda is full. At almost 100 years old, she has a schedule worthy of a government minister.
“Yesterday, I was in Voisenon, an hour and a half from Paris,” she says, while turning the pages of her calendar. “The conference lasted two hours. It was in a theatre with all the 9th-grade classes. I got home around 7 in the evening but that’s not important.”
She has a busy schedule speaking to young people for the next several weeks at a middle school, an event hall and at a high school.
“I don’t even have time to participate in the activities at the National Institution of Invalides,” she adds jokingly, referring to the military hospital that is also where Napoleon is buried.
Since arriving last May at Invalides, which is also a retirement home for veterans and civilian victims of war, Kolinka hasn’t really slowed down – despite being on track to celebrate her 100th birthday on February 4.
For the last 20 years, she has dedicated much of her time to young people, because she has a message.
“What’s important isn’t telling my story but making them understand what hatred can cause,” she says.
Read moreFrance’s last ‘hidden Jewish children’ share memories of surviving Holocaust
‘Then came Hitler’s plan to kill all the Jews’
Almost every weekday, Kolinka (née Cherkasky) goes 80 years into the past. With sometimes disconcerting frankness, she tells school pupils how her life changed during World War II when she was just a teenager.
“We lived very well until 1942. Then came Hitler’s plan to kill all the Jews,” she says simply.
Born in 1925 in Paris to a Jewish family originally from Ukraine and Romania, she fled the French capital in the summer of 1942 to seek refuge in Avignon, in the Zone libre (Free zone). South of the demarcation line, the Zone libre was administered by the Vichy-based French government of Philippe Pétain until November 1942, when the German military took control.
For several months, the Cherkaskys lived using fake IDs. Kolinka and her five sisters worked at markets on the ramparts of Avignon. But on March 13, 1944, after having been betrayed to the authorities, she was arrested by the Gestapo along with her father Léon, her 12-year-old brother Gilbert, and her 14-year-old nephew, Georges.
“The Gestapo threw us into a car but I had time to glimpse a young man who had been passing by for several days and smiling at us. When I saw him again, I understood he wasn’t there to flirt with us but that he must have been thinking it would soon be our turn,” she recalls. The rest of the family were not at home when the Gestapo came and so escaped arrest.
First imprisoned in Avignon and then in Les Baumettes prison in Marseille, she was later transferred to Drancy near Paris. Drancy was where Jews were detained before being deported to the concentration and extermination camps to the east.
At just 19 years old, she wanted to believe what the Nazis’ were saying. Somewhat naively, she clung to the idea that they would be sent to a work camp.
“My father didn’t say anything to me. He could have said, ‘Ginette, stop dreaming. Look around you. Do you really think they arrested children, pregnant women and disabled people to make them work?’ I could see what was around us but I wasn’t afraid.”
‘I was nothing anymore’
Kolinka was deported a month later to Auschwitz-Birkenau along with her father, brother and nephew on convoy No. 71, the same convoy that deported French politician Simone Veil, writer-filmmaker Marceline Loridan-Ivens and the “Children of Izieu”, a group of Jewish children and their carers who had been hidden in an orphanage in Izieu, a village east of Lyon.
The journey was a foretaste of hell. “Imagine the horrendous smell in the wagon with people who hadn’t washed for three days and who had relieved themselves where they stood,” she recalls.
After a journey in near-darkness, when the train arrived it was chaos. “There was screaming. They pushed us onto the platform. I couldn’t understand anything they were saying.”
German soldiers eventually pointed to trucks for the most frail-looking people. Kolinka advised her father and younger brother to get into these vehicles: “My father listened to me but when I tried to kiss them goodbye, they had already gone.”
Kolinka was then separated from her nephew and selected for forced labour. She entered the women’s camp at Birkenau, where the dehumanising process began with brutal force. “They made us enter a room. Schnell! Schnell! Fast! Undress yourselves!” she recounts. “When I’m asked what the worst thing was, it was that moment when I was forced to be naked. I was nothing anymore. I covered my breasts, my genitals, and I didn’t dare look at people.” Her prisoner number was tatooed onto her forearm and she was shaved all over her body.
Despite these initial humiliations, she still didn’t understand where she was. She hoped to see her brother and father again. But deportees who had been at the camp longer quickly shattered her hopes: “These women were no longer human beings. Instead of being kind and gentle with us, they told us to look at the smoke. That’s when I discovered, without having been prepared, that this was a killing factory and that those who had got into the trucks had been murdered in the gas chambers.”
Eight decades later, the pain is still intense. Kolinka has lived ever since then with the guilt of having advised her elderly father and little brother to get onto the trucks. And, in her words, “sent them to their deaths”.
As prisoner 78599, she endured endless roll calls, food deprivation, violence from the kapos (prisoners assigned by SS guards to supervise other inmates), and the harshness of physical labour. In late October 1944, faced with the Soviet army’s advance, the SS began transferring prisoners out of Auschwitz. Kolinka was sent to Bergen-Belsen, where she remained until early February 1945. She was then selected to work at Raguhn, in a factory connected to the Buchenwald camp. In late April, the camp was evacuated and she found herself in a convoy headed for the Terezin ghetto-camp.
Kolinka witnessed the Liberation of Terezin, in what was then Czechoslovakia. But the young woman, who had contracted typhus, was severely ill. She wasn’t able to return to France until June 6. Repatriated to Lyon, she learned that her mother and four of her sisters had survived the Holocaust (one sister, Léa, had been arrested in 1943 then deported and murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau). Her nephew, who had arrived at Auschwitz with her, had initially been selected to work but had not survived until the end of the war.
‘She mistook me for my little brother’
After a brief stay at Hotel Lutetia, a temporary reception centre for concentration camp survivors in Paris, she raced to her old address. “The concierge thought she recognised me but she mistook me for my little brother Gilbert.” She was 20 years old but weighed only 26 kilos.
Her mother opened the door and the two women fell into each other’s arms. Kolinka abruptly told her mother that her husband and son would not return: “You’ll never hear from them! They were murdered! Their bodies were burned!” In hindsight, she says she regrets what she describes as her lack of humanity in that moment. “I never apologised. To me, I had done mother a service but now I realise it must have been a terrible blow for her to hear it that way.”
The years passed and life resumed its course. In the early 1950s, she married and ran a hosiery stall at a market in Aubervilliers. Her only son Richard, future drummer of the French rock band Téléphone, was born in 1953.
For many decades, she kept silent about her deportation experience. But in 1996, her past caught up with her. She was contacted by a documentary filmmaker who wanted her to tell her story for the foundation Steven Spielberg created following the success of “Schindler’s List”. She initially refused but finally agreed. She also began making notes about her daily life at the camp, although she declined all invitations to return.
‘I don’t believe it will ever change’
It wasn’t until 2003 that she finally changed her mind and decided to return to Poland. Kolinka eventually went on numerous trips with groups visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau site. Now approaching 100, she no longer makes the journey but tirelessly continues to share her story. Kolinka has become an emblematic figure and is among the last Holocaust survivors but says she harbours few illusions.
“I hope young people understand the message. I’m not sure they do.”
Faced with rising anti-Semitism, she does not hide her pessimism. “We’re a handful of Jews and people still hate us. I don’t believe it will ever change.”
For Kolinka, the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau ultimately represents one thing: “That I’ve been lucky. If I can celebrate it, it means I’m still alive.”
There’s a knock at the door; a visit from a friend. “Welcome to my second home!” she calls out with a big smile.
Kolinka hasn’t lost her sharp wit. Despite a youth marked by suffering and now the burdens of age, her laughter prevails.
“My room isn’t bad, is it? I sleep with Napoleon,” she jokes, pointing to the dome of Les Invalides that houses Napoleon’s tomb.
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