Promoted to the rank of Commander of the Legion of Honor on January 1, 2022, Helene Mouchard-Zay was decorated this Sunday at the Hôtel Dupaloup in Orléans. It is Serge Klarsfeldthe president of the Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees from France and a famous lawyer who led all his life a militant action for the recognition of the Holocaust, who presented to the founder of the circletthe Center for Studies and Research on the Loiret internment camps, his medal.
A distinction that the Orléanaise dedicated to her father, John Zay, figure of the resistance and pantheonized in 2015, as well as to the people who have accompanied him for 30 years in his work for the memory of the concentration camps of Pithiviers, Jargeau and Beaune-la-Rolande. “All the people who successively brought their support, whether to help the development of the Cercil, the institutions that helped us and especially the survivors, the families who came to see us nourished this adventure, this commitment, it is them who made the success of this institution. The energy or the force that I could have I drew it there“, she explained after a moving speech.
Serge Klarsfeld hails the success of an “institution with an important civic role”
Yes Helene Mouchard-Zay didn’t want to show off, Serge Klarsfeld took care of it. “She took the initiative to create the Cercil, learning of the extent of the tragedy of the Loiret concentration camps. The Cercil owes nothing to anyone except Hélène Bouchard-Zay.“The historian also wanted to salute the difficulty of”create an institution on for the memory of a tragic page that involves the government of France at the time“.
“Hélène Bouchard-Zay was a brave fighter 30 years ago, which she has remained. And she managed to impose an institution that many would have liked not to see it exist or get rid of. This institution has an important civic role since it recalls a tragedy that forever obstructs, I believe, the rehabilitation of the Vichy regime: the fate of thousands of children and their parents who experienced unbearable torment“, has followed Serge Klarsfeld.
Helene Bouchard-Zay also founded in 2011 the Memorial Museum of the children of the Vél d’Hiv d’Orléans. The municipality also indicated on the sidelines of the ceremony that a tribute would be paid “in the next few months or even weeks.” to Jean Zay.