For decades, Izio Rosenman has been a man of commitment. President of the Association pour un judaïsme humaniste et laïque (Association for a Humanist and Secular Judaism), he has, throughout his life, founded numerous associations and co-organized events and gatherings such as Livres des mondes juifs (Books of the Jewish Worlds); he has participated in several journals and has always been a militant for a just peace in the Middle East, engaged in dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis, notably through movements such as JCall and Shalom Achshav.
A physicist, research director at the CNRS, psychoanalyst and child psychotherapist, etc., his professional life has been very diverse.
Yet few are those who identify him as a survivor of the Shoah, still fewer as a survivor of the camps to which he was deported from the age of 7. It is only recently that he has agreed to bear witness. For Plurielles, the journal of which he is publication director, we have decided to ask him to speak about himself.
B.S. Izio, you were born in 1935 in Demblin, Poland, and you grew up in a family of Yiddish culture. In 1942, with your two sisters and your parents, you were sent to a labor camp in Demblin, after the ghetto had been liquidated and the town declared Judenrein. In the summer of 1944, your family was taken to the internment camp at Częstochowa. Then you were separated and your father and you were deported in January 1945 to Buchenwald. From your mother and your sisters, you would have no news until an almost miraculous reunion after the war. At Buchenwald you were placed in Block 66, the children’s block, created and protected by the Resistance, mostly communist, alone, without your father who would not survive and who would die at Buchenwald a few weeks after the Liberation. Two months after the liberation of the camp, you arrived in France with a group of child survivors of Buchenwald and were taken in by the OSE (Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants, the Children’s Aid Society). You would remain in the OSE children’s homes until 1953, the year you rejoined your mother and your sisters, who had survived. One rarely associates your name with the idea of “Shoah survivor,” as if all the rest of your commitments had taken precedence over this nonetheless essential dimension of your existence. Is this a deliberate, accomplished choice?
Surely, yes. Today, I think it was a deliberate choice. And as I remain marked by a strong religious education received during my adolescence, I spontaneously want to quote the verse from Deuteronomy: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, that you may live, you and your descendants.” I believe this choice of life guided me, that it was a driving force. I often think of the words of Théo Klein, who used to say: “The Shoah happened to me, but it does not sum up my life”… And it is true for me. This catastrophe traversed my existence, but it did not define me. It of course transformed me, it modified my life and my vision of things, but it did not fundamentally undermine my capacity to project myself into a future — a future in which it no longer had its place.
B.S. Your first testimonies date only from 2006. Why this long silence? Was it necessary for reconstruction?
This choice of life consists also in keeping, in preserving, even in the midst of misfortune, the memories of moments, of experiences that come to belie the horror of the world. I do not think I set the Shoah “aside” as so many others did, for whom this setting-apart was also the condition of survival; I think of my sister Ida, who for a very long time deliberately set aside her memories of Dachau in order to be able to live. Of course, a certain distance was necessary; it was very difficult to build oneself up from this misfortune, one had in a way to surpass it. Modesty was also a protection among the survivors, to the point that we were unaware of what people close to us had lived through. I think of my friend Élie Buzyn. We were students, and because of the war he had started his medical studies late. At the time — that is, the early fifties — I was studying physics and we regularly crossed paths in the Latin Quarter. But neither he nor I knew the other’s story. It was only twenty years later that we found out… We had been brought together by the will of one of our “adoptive mothers,” a former Bundist militant who had taken great care of us, the child survivors, whom she considered a little as her own children. We were going to commemorate the liberation of Buchenwald in the apartment of my sister Hadassa, and there, to my great surprise, I see Élie Buzyn arrive, whom everyone called Lolek. Neither of us knew that the other had been at Buchenwald and that we had arrived in France on the same transport. We had never spoken of it; each of us was deeply caught up in the desire to live, to build a life.
B.S. Many survivors began to bear witness late. One thinks of Marceline Loridan, of Ginette Kolinka. It seems that with age and the disappearance of the “last witnesses,” this has also become an argument for overcoming personal modesty.
Yes, of course, age makes things more urgent… I well understand this feeling of being the “last witnesses.” I believe this is the case for Ginette Kolinka and others. I know that my friend Evelyn Askolovitch is today very happy to be able to go into high schools and bear witness to her life during the Shoah.
It seems to me that testimony is also very important for those who bear it, but one must not forget the cost and sometimes the danger it can represent. The psychoanalyst Rachel Rosenblum has evoked the sometimes deadly — and not only redemptive — effect of testimony. For her, some witnesses have not been able to bear the violence of reliving the trauma. Some have committed suicide after telling their story… Moreover, I have always been struck by the observation that not everyone reacts in the same way to a trauma. It is not identical for each of us:
Élie Buzyn saw his brother shot dead before his eyes… I lost my father, but I did not see him die. Moreover, I had the incredible, almost miraculous “luck” of finding my mother and my sisters after the war.
When I began my psychoanalysis after ’68, it was also because I wanted to reflect, on the basis of my personal experience, on what the Shoah could have done to children. I deeply believe today that the effects of the Shoah on those who lived through it also depend on what each had lived through beforehand — that is, on his capacity to resist suffering.
And this resistance to psychic destruction is of course linked to experienced events, but also to the capital of trust they had received, before the Shoah, at the start of their existence. When I look at my life, I tell myself that I am rather happy not to have frozen into the idea that the whole human race was “against us.” I believe that this is perhaps for me what it means “to be on the left” — even if one may see in it a certain naïveté. I continue to “believe in Man,” for it is an idea I prefer to the one Thomas Hobbes made famous: homo homini lupus est — “man is a wolf to man.”
B.S. In one of your testimonies, you tell the story of one of your uncles who would go first thing in the morning to pray at the synagogue and then join his comrades from the communist cell in the woods for a meeting. They weighted with stones red flags which they sent up onto the telegraph lines. One day he was denounced, arrested, then released, because a communist militant with tefillin did not seem credible to the police… It is reminiscent of Isaac Babel’s books. Do this gesture and especially these various fidelities continue to inspire you?
The commitment I lay claim to was at once Jewish and of the left, and this uncle with tefillin who threw red flags is indeed one of its most novelistic illustrations. Jewish commitment was always there, it was part of my history, and it seems to me that in all my commitments, it remained present. When I militated against the Algerian War and when, later, I invested myself in the Vietnam committees, I perhaps did not go there as a Jew, but this dimension was part of my identity and my militancy. And then of course the commitment to the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — the one that demands the recognition of a Palestinian state — has always drawn from the same source.
The left was part of my family’s ideal, and one can say that many paid for it in their flesh. For me this commitment is indefectibly bound to an ethic that is fundamental and that also refers back to the words of the prophets. All this has a meaning that goes beyond religion or culture. Before creating the AJHL (Association pour un judaïsme humaniste et laïque) with Albert
Memmi, Violette Attal Lefi and other friends in the nineties, I had created the Association “Pour un judaïsme d’aujourd’hui” (For a Judaism of Today).
B.S. Many survivors, you have said, chose to fall silent about their memories and their suffering, and this was sometimes combined with a setting-aside of their Jewishness. I think of commitments like Marceline Loridan’s to Maoism, but also of so many others… This wounded identity, you did not wish to escape it, but on the contrary to repair it…
It is true, I did not have a “universalist” commitment that would put my Jewishness in parentheses, and conversely, my Jewish identity I have always thought on the side of universalism. I situate myself outside religion while remaining within a certain Jewish historical tradition. In Judaism, it seems to me, from the sixteenth century onward, the time of Joseph Caro, the author of the Shulchan Aruch, there was a separation. There are the religious Jews who kept the mitzvot ben adam la-makom — that is, “between man and God” — and those who kept the mitzvot ben adam le-havero — that is, between man and his neighbor — in large part secular Jews who would later lay claim to the Enlightenment.
But there is a word that seems essential to me in what you said: it is the word “reparation” — this reparation of the world that tradition calls Tikkun Olam.
To be deported is, as I have recounted, to live among the dead, to brush against death daily. At Buchenwald, in the quarantine camp, we would wake each morning with the dead of the night, whom we picked up to carry out and deposit in piles before bringing them to the crematorium. Of course this kills something in oneself, it kills sensitivity to the other, it sometimes kills love and friendship. Despair made robots of us; we protected ourselves so well that we ended up no longer feeling anything — that too was survival.
I was ten years old upon my arrival in France on June 6, 1945, coming from Buchenwald. We were 426 young survivors from several countries. The youngest among us was eight, the oldest twenty; we had learned to survive in danger and adversity. Most of us had lost the better part of our family. Even before the camps, we had already experienced the hatred directed against us, the ghettos, the rejection. Each of us had undergone physical and moral violence. We had experienced hunger, cold, abandonment, and solitude. We were “false youths” — we had become adult too soon, old men. I think it is difficult to put oneself inside the head of a child survivor, to imagine the sum of suffering endured and its destructive effect. Fundamentally, his relation to adults had been transformed: they were no longer those who protected him, they had become, like others, threats to him.
We had lived in a brutal world in which only the arbitrary reigned as master.
All this had profound consequences.
Thus, after the war, especially for most of the adolescent survivors, it was very difficult to obey an order, a law. It was necessary to rebuild oneself, and this passed through the return of a confidence in the world, a confidence in adults — the educators who guided us or the teacher who taught us. In these homes, we were taught again to be children or adolescents. For me the OSE homes were that place of welcome and rebuilding. For other survivors, it was those of the OPEJ and the CCE.1 There people loved me right away, ensuring for me that return toward life. All those, women and men, who worked there were of an extraordinary devotion; they helped us get back on our feet, rebuild ourselves, project ourselves into careers, contemplate building families… Most “normal” children want to become adults quickly and shed this childhood like a coat too tight; for us, it is this coat we lacked. We made the inverse journey, and we had to relearn how to play, to laugh, and also to cry.
Each of us has lived through those moments of solidarity that allowed us to survive: one day someone gave us a shoe, a piece of bread; my friend Armand Bulwa remembers the one who gave him his belt — Élie Buzyn — allowing him to hold up his pants during roll call and not die under the blows. Armand and Élie became friends for life. In Block 66 where we were, the children were taken in charge by the Resistance. I often think of those former Russian prisoners, met years later at a ceremony at Buchenwald, who told me they each gave a little of their meager food for the children of the block.
B.S. You make me think of “small kindness” of which Vasily Grossman speaks in Life and Fate : the small kindness that is worth far more than the great Good, the only one capable of opposing Evil. “This private, occasional, ideology-free kindness is eternal,” he writes. So are these testimonies of humanity what one must choose to retain? To remember the one who helped, who hid… But in this ocean of hatred that submerged you, how does one keep the strength to make this choice still?
In reality, if we keep these precious moments within us, it is also quite simply because it is these gestures that saved us and allowed us to survive. In the destitution we were living, every gesture had a vital consequence. There is always in each of our histories a great share of chance and a still greater share of encounters.
These moments of humanity always seem miraculous. I remember that in the camp of Częstochowa, a labor camp before Buchenwald, a woman doctor among the detainees took care of me; I had just turned 9.
My mother and sisters were in another camp. Years later, my mother discovered that she herself had taken care of a little girl who happened to be the daughter of this woman doctor.
In her book L’enfer des innocents (The Hell of the Innocents), Rachel Minc recalled how a young Jewish survivor told her how, in the rubble of a German house she was cleaning with other prisoners after a bombing, she had found a small package containing buttered bread with this note: “We are mothers, our sons are at the front, and we think of your mothers, we have pity on you.” “This package,” the young woman told her, “awakens in me a vivid desire to live. One day you will see, we will be mothers too.” Gestures and words can save.
I drew very paradoxical lessons from the camp: there, solidarity was life, it was not forgetting the other. This limit-experience did not destroy my hope in man. It is in this that I remain a man of the left whatever the political vagaries — one is not oneself if one does not help the other…
B.S. Among the people who counted and who helped you, there is Élie Wiesel.
Élie Wiesel was my friend, he was someone I loved and respected. We were liberated together from Buchenwald in April 1945. Both of us were part of the convoy of 426 children that arrived from Buchenwald in France in June 1945. He was older than me. We came from different worlds: he, a young Hungarian Jew of 16, came from a religious milieu.
I was a Polish Jewish child of 9, from a family of the left.
Decades after the War he reminded me that he had taken care of me during our stay in Block 66, the children’s block, where I was among the youngest. I did not remember it. We had both lost our fathers at Buchenwald and we were together in 1946 in the OSE children’s home at Versailles. I remember that Élie sang with an exceptionally melodious voice, and we listened to him in an impressive silence.
This voice, he continued to carry, not only as a witness of Jewish sufferings, but also to support and make heard those of oppressed minorities — whether the Jews of the USSR, but also elsewhere in the world, engaging alongside the wounded peoples of Cambodia, Darfur, Rwanda. Élie Wiesel always had in mind that during the Shoah “the world had fallen silent” — that was, moreover, the title of his first book in Yiddish, which later became La nuit (Night). He was a Jew anchored in his traditional religious roots, which always served him as moral references. He was a rebel against God; but a rebel against God who was not an atheist.
All his life, Élie Wiesel studied and wrote. I remember when I went to see him in New York almost 60 years ago, he told me that he got up every morning at 5 AM to study before setting himself to write. Writing, for him, was also his way of making a vanished world live again — a tradition that had been meant to be assassinated; for him, to forget it and let it die was to kill it a second time.
Wiesel rebuilt himself through study and transmission. Of course we remember him above all as a witness, but we often forget that he also wrote some forty books. Wiesel was haunted by the world’s indifference, and that is what he said at the moment of his reception of the Nobel Peace Prize:
“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
It is these commitments — which throw a bridge between the present and the future — that for me remain bound to the memory of my friend Élie Wiesel, a witness, but also a committed Jew.
B.S. At the end of her book Le savoir déporté (Deported Knowledge), the psychoanalyst Anne-Lise Stern wrote: “There is another way to avoid, to circumvent the absolute caesura in our time that the ‘final solution’ constitutes; it is the maintenance of a humanist, leftist ethic.”2 Is remaining Jewish and of the left the great challenge for you, the supreme denial of Nazism?
Yes, and I believe that here too the two are linked. To remain of the left and to remain Jewish — that is, to maintain something of a confidence in the life and the world that they tried to destroy — I believe was the major stake of our existences after the War. It was the strength of the renewal of Jewish thought.
Rereading André Schwarz-Bart, Manès Sperber, Jean Améry, or Élie Wiesel, Anny Dayan Rosenman, my wife, studied in Les Alphabets de la Shoah (The Alphabets of the Shoah) this will to be Jewish after the catastrophe.
I believe Anne-Lise Stern summed up what represents for us a challenge.
The “maintenance of an ethic” is also the maintenance of a future. It is true, I had this experience of Evil, but without allowing it to be a transcendence. I do not think I am naïve, but I fundamentally believe that one can only build a humanity — let us say a slightly more humane one — in this refusal.
Moreover, even in the heart of the catastrophe, Jews resisted with weapons when they could, but also with the spirit. There was the incredible experience of the École des prophètes of the Haute-Loire maquis. These resistants who organized rescue networks for Jews had set up, as early as 1943, in parallel, a circle of study and formation in Judaism; Robert Gamzon, Georges Lévitte, Jacob Gordin, André Chouraqui taught there.
For them, resistance to Nazism passed also through study, through this will to remain Jewish in study. At Buchenwald, it is hard to imagine, but a “clandestine school” had been created in a block of Russian prisoners!
I would like to evoke the names of Walter Bartel, Wilhelm Hammann, Gustav Schiller, who, among other exceptional men, risked their lives for the children’s: they took care of us at Buchenwald, and thanks to them, about nine hundred children miraculously came out of the camp alive on April 11, 1945. The youngest was four.
B.S. You encountered psychoanalysis in ’68, relatively early in your existence, and this also seems quite original in the path of a survivor, for many of them spent years fleeing their memories, even fleeing themselves… You did the opposite… to the point of becoming a therapist. One has the impression that you touch on everything, but that you remain, faithfully, anchored to your history, as if it were the starting point but also the home port of all your commitments.
It is true, I touched on a bit of everything; there was in me, as in many survivors, a thirst to live and to make up for lost time. I had not attended school until I was 10. I studied, I also wandered, in Africa, in Asia. At a certain moment I wanted to know, to discover what I was in reality. I was then a physicist, a researcher at the CNRS, but I was also interested in ethnology and sociology; I remember having, from the very beginning of my work as a physicist, attended Alain Touraine’s seminar.
Of course, my father, who died at Buchenwald, was missing to me as a model; it was complicated to build oneself, and thus many people and thinkers played for me the role of “references.” Psychoanalysis allowed me to understand this. As a child, I had been very obedient. When one is obedient, it seems to me that one learns less than when one is in revolt — even if at the same time revolt can be destructive. I often had the feeling of having molded myself in the desire of others; at a moment in my life, I needed to explore my own desires. After ’68, I began studies in psychology, but also in sociology and anthropology, and I began an analysis. Psychoanalysis helped me build myself; it lasted ten years and then I became a therapist.
Analysis, like the studies in ethnology or the apprenticeship in Burmese you mentioned (we were 3 or 4 in 1968 at the Langues O’ studying that language)
was also a way of approaching one’s desire by experiencing others… In psychoanalysis I did my supervisions with two psychoanalysts I admired, Piera Aulagnier-Castoriadis and then Micheline Enriquez. And I have always felt close to the ideas of Erich Fromm, who maintained this triple alliance; he had a Jewish education and continued all his life to study with a Jewish master, he was a psychoanalyst, and had been a Marxist.
Psychoanalysis was important for me, including as a “going out of oneself.” A little like commitment. And I must say that the experience of doing analytical psychodrama with children was also important for me. And also of doing it within the framework of the OSE CMPP with Pérel Wilgowicz, whose memory I would like to recall. We had been trained by Jean Chambon at the Institute of Psychoanalysis.
B.S. To be oneself, then, is also “to go out of oneself”? One thinks of Abraham who departs toward himself (lech lecha), and of the biblical injunction to keep “the memory of having been a stranger in the land of Egypt.” To be Jewish and of the left, for a long time it went without saying; for a long time we made the Jewish ethic and the humanist ethic enter into dialogue. Today it seems no longer to go without saying. The historian Diana Pinto wrote that there were two ways of envisioning “never again”: either a “never again” for the world, or a “never again” for the Jews…
It no longer goes without saying at all. No. And I believe that nothing saddens me more than to hear Jews oppose the welcoming of refugees… It always seems to me that the retreat, the exclusion, the racist remarks made by Jews are an insult to our history. After the war, Jewish intellectuals asked themselves how to rebuild a living Judaism after the Shoah, and this question joined another which was “how are we going to survive collectively?”
Likewise, there were many philosophers, I think among others of Hannah Arendt and those of the Frankfurt School, who placed at the center of their reflection responsibility, judgment, the worried vigilance in the face of every form of complicity or indifference toward evil.
What does tradition, and above all our collective memory, have to tell us regarding the present world? How today does one respect the stranger? One cannot be a Just and approve the expulsions of Roma, for example.
For a long time, especially in the twentieth century, it is true, Jews engaged in great numbers in revolutionary movements and more generally in struggles for the liberation of others. They perhaps had a clear consciousness of their weakness and believed that Jews could not liberate themselves except by helping other oppressed peoples to liberate themselves. After the war, this feeling remained among some, despite the Shoah or because of it; one had then to maintain a vigilance, but also a solidarity with the excluded, the discriminated, the threatened, the rejected, as we ourselves had been — precisely because, during the Shoah, we had not always benefited from this solidarity.
Today, it seems to me that this generosity has dried up. The wave of withdrawal, of egoism, and of fear unfortunately concerns everyone: the rise of nationalisms, populisms, and fanaticisms bears witness to it. This perhaps proves that we are not very different from others, though we often think ourselves better… This wave, which the historian of thought Daniel Lindenberg had denounced at its beginnings, drives me to despair. Because for me there is no horizon in right-wing thought. We know today that we have the technological means of a generalized surveillance that surpasses all fictions.
The idea of waging war ad vitam aeternam, surveillance, borders, and walls — no, I see in these options neither horizon nor future.
I always imagine that if all this money were used differently — to help rather than exclude people living in difficult neighborhoods… or in poor countries to manufacture solidarity together — the world would be better.
One can understand these tendencies as the result of a despair, but, no more than yesterday, are they bearers of a “human progress.” I do not believe that measures of police control and exclusion can make the world better.
B.S. The commitment of Jews alongside the exiled and in international solidarity nevertheless remains. Even if it is less strong than before and little represented in the “community” instances. By their history, Jews have perhaps had this chance of maintaining a “disillusioned” commitment — that is, a commitment that envisages defeat and is wary of messianism in politics…
Yes, I think it is a lucidity that history imposed on us. For example, I was never a communist. From the age of 10, I read the newspapers. In my family, we knew the horror of Stalin’s crimes, we knew that neither Slansky and his comrades nor the “White Coats” were guilty. And indeed, Jewish commitment was often doubled with a worried vigilance. Gramsci used to say that “the pessimism of reason must ally itself with the optimism of the will.”
What seems precious to me in Judaism is the place of ethics, but also the fact that it is a collective and a memory. There is the founding myth of liberty with the departure from Egypt and of the law, with the revelation at Sinai, but there is above all a long memory of more than 2,000 years that is a memory and a history of minorities.
I have always thought that Jews had resources in their own past. A past that was not only dark. When they obtained citizenship, Jews accomplished considerable things. When I read that the twenty-first century will be the century of migrations, this also means that the very concepts of minorities and majority will have to evolve. I believe we should learn from our own past, but also reflect on how to share this long experience of the margin. Our memory does not refer us back to the majority. Freud said that he had learned, on the basis of the Jewish condition, not to be part of the “compact majority,” to be wary of it. There are few human groups that have remained for so long minorities. Moreover, it is not easy for those who have been majorities to be able to think themselves minorities… Today, there is one country where we are a majority, that is Israel, which, alas, has created another minority, the Palestinians on whom it imposes its law, and it seems to me that we are paying very dearly for it.
I believe that to be on the left is to keep this consciousness of being a minority, and this too is a wager on humanity. Moreover, conservative discourse, in addition to a desolating questioning of the Enlightenment, regularly attacks and mocks this “confidence,” this “faith” in humanity, described as naïveté. They disqualify hope and everything that resists and runs up against cynicism.
They speak of “human-rights-ism,” of “good feelings” — as if the bad ones were better… I believe one must claim this “naïveté,” for without it, there is only the worst.
B.S. Marceline used to say that one keeps all one’s life the age of one’s traumas. She had continued to be 15 years old all her life — rebellious, anticonformist, smoking joints — as if she had decided to recover this stolen adolescence by keeping it with her for eternity. I also think of Appelfeld, of Tomkiewicz, who preserved, even in the features and expressions of their faces, a childhood that took revenge for having been so prematurely dismissed. You were four years old when the war began and ten when it ended. You often speak of “naïveté,” but I rather think of the child’s gaze, with that anger without hatred that does not grow accustomed to the ugliness of the world.
These are very prestigious names, but perhaps it is indeed always a question of protecting the child who is within… Children, despite time, do not forget. Neither violence, nor especially incomprehension before violence. For children can give it no meaning.
More than a Shoah survivor, I would perhaps like to be remembered as someone who has kept his angers intact, but also enthusiasms, a capacity for astonishment, and a desire for openness to the world. No doubt this too is part of a “choice,” for there is always a choice. Even in the worst moments. Primo Levi evoked the lesson of one of his companions at the camp, in the worst conditions: “There still remains for us one resource and we must defend it with tenacity, for it is the last: refuse our consent.”3
And it is true, one must not consent to injustice. To remain human, that is perhaps what it is.
OPEJ: Œuvre de Protection de l’Enfance Juive (Jewish Childhood Protection Society). CCE: Commission Centrale de l’Enfance (Central Children’s Commission).↩︎
Anne-Lise Stern in Le savoir déporté, p. 229.↩︎
Primo Levi, Si c’est un homme (If This Is a Man), Julliard, 1987 for the French translation, p. 42.↩︎