Description
On 12 March 1943, Evelyn Askolovitch was four years old when she and her parents were arrested in Amsterdam. Fake papers from Honduras, a neutral country, enabled them to escape the extermination camps: the family, who had arrived in the Netherlands to flee Nazi Germany, were sent to the concentration camps of Vucht, Westerbork and then Bergen-Belsen.
She "almost died" in these places, where "children died of hunger, misery and disease". For decades, she would retain only a vague memory of those two years of suffering, flashbacks that haunted her. The subject was never raised in her family. "I thought you weren't concerned," her mother told her one day, as if her young age had spared her from this suffering. "It was reassuring for parents to think that children weren't involved, the better to bear the unbearable." It was only when she saw her name on Nazi documents collected by the Red Cross in 2012 that Evelyn realised what she had been through. "It became reality," she confides. Since then, she has given talks in schools about the reality of the camps. With her son, journalist Claude Askolovitch, she published a book in 2023, "Se souvenir ensemble" (Grasset). She is now 86 years old. IMAGES AND SOUNDBITES