He was a kid, born in Paris in 1931 to a couple of Polish Jewish immigrants, with his two sisters, living in the Montmartre district.

He is a pensioner who, in his house in Le Mans, is in breathtaking shape, chopping wood, walking for miles every day.

Between the two, the Vel d'Hiv roundup in July 1942, where his whole family was taken - 13,000 Jews were arrested by French police and gendarmes before being gathered at the Vélodrome d'Hiver to be sent to a concentration camp. concentration.

He is the only one to have escaped extermination.

The medals of Joseph Weismann, survivor of the Holocaust, on January 12, 2022 in Le Mans, France JOEL SAGET AFP

Transferred to the Beaune-la-Rolande camp, 85 km south of the capital, little Joseph is separated from his family and will escape by taking incredible risks.

This life has been told in a book ("After the roundup", 2011), and in a film which takes some liberties with his story, but in which he plays the role of an old man ("La Roundup", 2010).

Now it's in comics: "After the Roundup" (Les Arènes edition), which comes out on Tuesday.

"You have to tell the Holocaust, again and again, because there are people who have never heard of it. Time passes. We have left a lot of testimonies, films, books, interviews. But if we don't fight not anti-Semitism, the memory of the Holocaust will disappear,” he told AFP.

"More scars"

The drawing by Laurent Bidot and the screenplay by Arnaud Delalande add, according to him, a very striking realism.

"No one can understand what an inextricable barbed wire is (...) We had to make our way with our little hands. This mess, these intertwined rolls, it's really impenetrable. We spent six hours there. In length it was 20 or 30 meters. It's infernal!", recalls this Holocaust survivor.

Joseph Weismann, Holocaust survivor, January 12, 2022 in Le Mans, France JOEL SAGET AFP

"We were pissing blood, from the hands, from the skull, I still have scars. This inextricable side, you have to see it. The drawing translates it well", he believes.

Joseph Weismann, who became a father and then a grandfather, spent many years testifying to his survival in front of college and high school students.

He still meets some who, having become adults, tell him how much he has marked them.

He no longer has the strength of these long discussions, but has "always been surprised by the interest of these young people, from 14 years old to the baccalaureate. (...) Without realizing it, they transpose".

"A Million Children"

How he himself, at 11, made the crazy decision to try to get out of this camp, he does not fully understand.

"I look at the 11-year-old kid, and I think to myself: how did he come up with the idea of ​​escaping? It was ridiculous, it was infeasible".

"I know that I loved freedom very much, that I took it very badly that they came to arrest us when we had done nothing, that they locked us up in the Vel d'Hiv, a very trying moment , that we were put on this damn train, which was extremely painful … and we were still locked up in a camp? Fed up! We had to go, "he says.

He hadn't done it alone.

He had found another Joseph willing to give it a shot, Jo Kogan.

“We were weak. It had already been two years since the Occupation, we had nothing to eat”.

Now deceased, this other rebellious spirit had also started a family after the war.

His memory lives again in "Après la rafle", at the same time as that of the children of Vel d'Hiv.

As Joseph Weismann recalls, "during the Second World War, six million Jews were murdered. And in these six million, a million children. Can you imagine a million children passing in front of you? It's impossible. That's why I'm fighting this fight. Because I remained a child, and I can't understand that we do this to children.

© 2022 AFP