• As a little girl, Edith Moskovic hid in an institute for disabled people to escape deportation during World War II.

  • The Montpelliéraine “devoted its life to testifying to make understand the horrors of the Shoah” near high school and college students.

Edith Moskovic died on Tuesday at the age of 90, reports the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (Crif). Hidden child, during the Second World War, to escape deportation, Montpellier, knight of the Legion of Honor, "devoted her life to testifying in order to make people understand the horrors of the Shoah and to transmit a message of vigilance towards vis-à-vis anti-Semitism and hatred ”, especially among middle and high school students, recalls the association.

One winter morning in 1941, while she was living with her family in a village in Haute-Garonne, "the French police got us out of bed without giving us any explanations," Edith Moskovic told

20 Minutes.

in 2013. We ended up in a camp in the department.

We had lice, scabies… The cattle cars were waiting for us.

From then on, our childhood was stolen from all of us.

»Edith had just celebrated her 10th birthday.

"A young man asked me to forget my name"

It is to two guardians that she owes her salvation.

"My father bribed them with a little money and his wedding ring," she said.

One night they cut the barbed wire and we fled.

Hidden in a laundry basket, the little girl managed to get to Belgium, where she grew up.

Then “the roundups began.

I saw our neighbor being pulled by a policeman by the hair.

A couple then hid her in an attic.

“I don't know how long it lasted.

One morning a young man asked me to follow him.

And to forget my name.

"Eliane", as it was now called, will be taken in, for a few years, by an institute for the disabled.

One morning, at the end of the war, the little girl saw her father, “at the end of the road.

When he hugged me, I knew the nightmare was over.

"

Decades later, Edith Moskovic no longer felt any hatred.

“But I screamed inside me for years, she confided, in 2013. Time goes by and the witnesses disappear.

I cannot refuse to testify.

"With the disappearance" of witnesses and survivors of the Shoah, it is up to everyone to carry their message of vigilance ", underlines Crif, in a press release on Wednesday.

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  • Holocaust

  • Languedoc-Roussillon

  • Montpellier

  • Society

  • Second World War