Europe 1 with AFP 2:43 p.m., March 22, 2022
Jacqueline Teyssier, survivor of the Holocaust died on Sunday March 20 at the age of 98.
She was one of the last survivors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Poland where she was imprisoned in 1944 and released in 1945 in critical condition.
Since then, she had given herself the mission of telling younger generations about the atrocities she had experienced.
A survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp, Jacqueline Teyssier died on Sunday March 20 at the age of 98 after tirelessly testifying to the horrors of the Shoah, the city of Besançon announced on Tuesday.
Born in Paris on October 6, 1923, Jacqueline Teyssier, resistant and who made false papers, had been arrested on denunciation in May 1944. During her arrest, the militiamen had discovered that she was Jewish.
A year in Auschwitz-Birkenau
She was interned in the Drancy camp, before being deported at the age of 20 to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, on May 20, 1944. Selected to work, she had escaped the gas chamber.
The young woman was then transferred to the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany, before her liberation by the English in April 1945. "She was then in critical condition, suffering from typhus and weighing 28 kg", notes Vincent Briand, director of the Resistance and Deportation Museum in Besançon.
"I still dream of Auschwitz every night. Every morning, I watch my coffee flow and I'm happy," she had recently confided to the latter.
“She reminded the youngest of the chance to live in a democracy”
"Jacqueline Teyssier testified tirelessly to all generations in schools or during ceremonies, on her deportation, on her story as a survivor of the death camp, while showing no hatred towards her oppressors", greets the mayor Besançon ecologist, Anne Vignot, in a press release.
"She did not hesitate to remind the youngest of the chance to live in a democracy or the obligation to defend republican values", underlines the mayor.