Elie Buzyn, great witness of the Holocaust, in January 2015, in Paris. LIONEL BONAVENTURE / AFP The former deportee and great witness of the Holocaust, Elie Buzyn, is dead, learned Le Monde from his family, Monday, May 23. “He felt unwell yesterday [dimanche] evening just after a conference of testimonies, where he was with young people to “pass the baton”, a conference, which was very moving, very moving, which touched him a lot, “added his daughter, the former minister of health, Agnès Buzyn, to Agence France-Presse (AFP). “Until the end, he carried the voice of the victims of Nazi barbarism. (…) His memory obliges us”, immediately greeted Francis Kalifat, the president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) on Twitter. “He passed on the baton with incredible consistency and determination until the end,” said Chief Rabbi Haïm Korsia. immense witness of the Shoah and tireless fighter of the memory Élie Buzyn, left us. Until the end he carried… https://t.co/A64zxTKXXa— FrancisKalifat (@Francis Kalifat) Born on January 7, 1929 in Lodz, in Poland, Elie Buzyn was 93 years old. In early March 1940, he had watched his brother Avram, eleven years his senior, being executed by the Nazis. A month earlier, a decree had forced the Jews to leave their apartments and occupy a dilapidated part of town but, not having obeyed quickly enough, three young men, chosen at random, had been publicly executed. Avram was one of them. Read also Article reserved for our subscribers The hymn to the life of Elie Buzyn, a great witness to the Holocaust In the summer of 1944, the young Elie was then deported with his parents and his sister to Auschwitz. He will be the only survivor. Having become a doctor in France, he made himself, years later, a great witness to the Shoah, forcing himself, until his death, to maintain and transmit the collective memory. He called on young people to be “witnesses to witnesses” and had accompanied school groups led each year by the chief rabbi of France. The world
