Survivor of the Holocaust and tireless vigil of police violence, Maurice Rajsfus died Saturday at the age of 92. He will have devoted his life to denouncing repression in all its forms.
In his "Discordant Diary", published some twenty years ago, the eternal rebel explained that he had the feeling of being "on the brink of the Vél 'd'Hiv roundup, of being the random holder of" a long lease extorted from those who sought to destroy me, as they did with my parents, with my whole family. ”
Victim of the Vél 'd'Hiv roundup
Born on April 9, 1928 in a Parisian suburb, of Polish Jewish parents, his life changed with the defeat of 1940 and the first anti-Semitic laws of the Vichy government. He has to drop out of school, but the worst is yet to come.
On the morning of July 16, 1942, the young Maurice - aged 14 - and his family were arrested at their home by two police officers. One of them is their next door neighbor. They are victims of the Vél 'd'Hiv roundup. More than 13,000 Jews, including more than 4,000 children, were arrested that day by French law enforcement officials in the service of the Nazi regime.
If Maurice Rajsfus and his sister Jenny, then 16 years old, escape (a police officer had told his mother that French children aged 14 to 16 could leave the camp where they had been gathered before being taken to Drancy) , their parents will be murdered in Auschwitz.
Years later, Maurice Rajsfus will explain: “I deeply resent the police of this country, more than the Germans; without this police, the Nazis could not have done as much damage. Since 1942, I feel withdrawn vis-à-vis my compatriots: they were rather idle, and that did not change much afterwards ”. After the deportation of their parents, Jenny and Maurice lived two difficult years, constantly fearing a new wave of roundups.
"Historian of repression"
At the Liberation, he resumed his apprenticeship in jewelry and joined the Communist Youth and the PCF before being excluded from it on the pretext of being a "police provocateur". He then approaches Trotskyist then anarchist circles discovering in passing the surrealists. "I was delighted with everything that could harm this society to which I had not forgiven anything and with which my accounts would never be settled," he recalls in 1992.
He works in several newspapers. He was notably editorial secretary at Le Monde , but his militant commitment did not weaken. Witness to the violence of the security forces on October 17, 1961 against the Algerians demonstrating in Paris, on February 8, 1962 at the Charonne metro station, and during May 1968, he began to track down police slippages.
He became a “repression historian”, drew up files until he gathered thousands. And in 1994, he founded the Observatory of Public Liberties in the company of a few committed authors such as the writer Didier Daeninckx. He was also one of the initiators of the “ras l'Front” network (against the National Front) of which he was president for a few years.
A critical mind
Called as a defense witness at the trial of Maurice Papon, he refused to submit to the summons and was finally excused. "Send me the gendarmes." It will be good to see a survivor of the Vél 'd'Hiv roundup, the son of victims, be forced to testify in favor of an accomplice of the executioners, "he wrote to the president of the court.
He had stopped in recent years to list police slips on his card stock, but continued to follow the news and regularly denounced police violence.
A Jew, he also unreservedly criticized the policies of the Israeli government and defended the Palestinian cause.
Author of around sixty books, he recently entrusted Liberation with his wish to transmit his archives of articles around police violence, meticulously organized from 1968 to 2014.
- Police violence
- Holocaust
- Society
- Disappearance