Simon Drucker UNESCO 2014

Simon Drucker was born in 1924 in Paris, France, in a Jewish family of Polish origin. His parents, Abraham and Thérèse, left Poland in 1921. Simon had a younger
brother, Isidore. Engaged in the French Foreign Legion during the outbreak of the war, Abraham was arrested in June 1942 and deported first to Pithiviers, and later to Auschwitz, where he was murdered.

On July 16, 1942, Simon, Thérèse, and Isidore were arrested during the Vélodrome d’Hiver roundup. Interned in the Beaune-la-Rolande concentration camp, he witnessed the deportation of his mother and brother, who perished in Auschwitz. Simon was also deported and incarcerated in more than ten concentration camps and
prisons between 1942 and 1945. Before Allied Forces liberated the territory where he last escaped from a camp, he escaped, and survived in the Czechoslovak countryside.

In May 1945, Simon was repatriated to Paris. Simon lost all of his family members during the Holocaust. In 1948, he left France to fight in Israel’s War of Independence. He returned to France in 1952. In Paris, he met his wife in 1953, whom he married in 1954. The couple’s daughter was born in 1957. When his interview was filmed, he had one grandson.

The interview was conducted in Paris on February 21, 1997. The interviewer was Phlippe Stroun and the cameraman was Sylvain Kauffmann.

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