Ginette Kolinka arrives alone, from Paris where she took the metro and then the train, to continue testifying. This time, it is to the agricultural school of Fondettes that his journey takes him. At 97, she travels with her small suitcase, full of photos, portraits, steeped in history. As soon as she enters the high school amphitheater, where 200 first and final year students are waiting for her, the hubbub gives way to silence.
The weight of history
With boundless energy, this dynamic and very laughing nonagenarian, Ginette settles in and starts instantly: she pulls out photo portraits from the pre-war erathose of her nephew, her brother and herself and immediately challenges a young man “You there with the sweater, are they normal? Are they aliens? Humans?”the student responds instantly “yes, I see normal human beings”. Ginette goes on, “Me too, I think we are normal, but a gentleman called Hitler didn’t think we were normal. Because we were Jews”. The story takes hold.
Never forget
Ginette Kolinka tells her story, but also somewhere that of six million Jews during the Holocaust. She closes her eyes and tells, with precision, taking us by the hand. Impossible not to be transported.
At 19, she was deported with her father, her little brother and her nephew, whom she would never see again. They will all be gassed when they arrive. She tells this in the most total humility, it is the continuity of her story. In the amphitheater, the silence is heavy, replaced by the sound of packets of tissues, young people blowing their noses, sniffling, a few tears.
– Adel Beloumri
The humiliation told
Ginette tells everything. Talways closing your eyes. Humiliation, the process of dehumanization. The worst ? When she arrives at the barracks in Birkenau, “we have to undress, Schnell! Schnell! that means we have to act quickly, the Nazis tell us. That moment is the worst, staying naked, in front of women. Then, they take my arm brutally, to write a number on it. Ginette then rolls up her left sleeve and reveals the number. 78599. It’s carved into his flesh.
As the story comes to an end, after more than an hour and a half of attentive listening, we see again her gentle gaze, full of humanity, “I am in my memories, I see them, I feel them, but the important thing is that you become good memory smugglers. Thank you”. She’s the one to thank. High school students rush there, some to sign his book “we study it for the French baccalaureate”while others are still too emotional to move.
Ginette will testify everywhere, after years walled in silence
Clothilde, 16, dries her tears, her voice trembling “I had already seen a former concentration camp, but I find it very moving when it’s a lady who survived who tells the story. We will do everything to pass on her story, it must never happen again”. Next door, Marie-Clémence, in the same class, goes on full of spirit, “despite the fact that we did not experience this period, we were there, given how she tells, we see that it is marked in her memory. It’s great that she was able to come and tell us about her story” .
– Adel Beloumri
Today, she travels as much as she can to testify. However, for fifty years, Ginette remained silent. But, in the 2000s, the Union of Auschwitz Deportees asked him to fill in and accompany a school group to Birkenau. “Now I can’t stop talking. Random thanks” laughs the brilliant Ginette.
As long as she is alive, she will continue to testify, it is her promise. At 97, here she is, already off again, with her little suitcase, all alone, heading to Paris. After the Vosges, after Touraine, Ginette continues to survey the schools of France, “every day, except weekends”.