Ginette Kolinka (born Ginette Cherkasky; 4 February 1925) is a French Holocaust survivor. When her father and brother were taken away to be killed by poison gas, shortly after the train on which they had been transported arrived at Auschwitz, she was selected for factory work and taken to the women's camp. Released in May 1945, she remained silent about her war-time experiences for half a century. Her own explanation for this is that she did not wish to irritate people. Whatever the truth of that, after her husband died, and soon after the dawn of a new century, she became an energetic "ambassador for the memory" of those times, criss-crossing the country to share her holocaust knowledge with school children and students. Thanks to the ensuing media exposure, it is no longer only among children and students that, during the first decades of the twenty-first century, she has heightened awareness of the Shoah and its lessons.
Biography Provenance and early years Ginette Cherkasky was born in the family home at Paris into a non-religious Jewish family, the youngest of her parents' six daughters. After July 1931 there would also be one younger brother. The final decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth had witnessed massive population shifts from east to west across Europe, drawn by disparities in wage levels and, in the case of Jewish families, driven by pogroms and rumours of them. Her father, Léon, ran a little garments business, manufacturing rain coats. He had been born in Paris. Her paternal grandfather's family, the Cherkaskys, had arrived from Ukraine (at that time, from a mainstream French or English perspective, part of the Russian Empire, even of the local realities were more varied and nuanced). Her mother, born Berthe Fairstin, had been born at Pitești in Romania. Ginette's earliest years were spent in central Paris, after which the family moved to Aubervilliers, just outside the city on its north side. In around 1935 they returned to central Paris, living in a family apartment within the commercial space occupied by her father's manufacturing workshop.
War Ginette Cherkasky was 14 when the French government declared war on Germany during the fortnight between the German invasion of Poland from the west and the Russian invasion of Poland from the south and east. She was 15 by the time Germany over-ran France from (primarily) the north during the early summer of 1940. The Paris region was in the northern half of France which, together with the country's Atlantic coast, came under direct German military administration, while the southern half of the country was less directly controlled, through a puppet government. Thousands of Parisians fled south. At this stage Cherkasky's family remained in the Paris region, however. During 1941 her uncle and a brother-in-law were arrested, probably in connection with their Jewish provenance.
Escape to the south It was almost certainly during July 1942 that, with her parents and younger brother, Ginette Cherkasky hastily set off towards the southern half of France, which at this stage could still be identified without excessive irony as the "free zone". The previous evening an official from the préfecture had turned up at the door. The official had come across a reference to the family in the préfecture files, and had come to warn them of something contained in them: "You are Jews and communists, you should leave Paris!" Léon Cherkasky simply nodded: it is not clear whether he had even recognised their unexpected visitor. Later that evening he made his way to the café at the nearby "Carreau du Temple" (covered market), a well-known meeting place where it was possible to find people willing and able to help refugees. He procured forged identity papers, and before they left in the morning made sure that the children had all memorised their new names. Cherkasky insisted that the family should split into smaller groups of three or four, each of which travelled separately by different routes. There are hints that initially the children - at least the youngest of them, accompanying their parents - thought they were embarking on some sort of "grand vacation": reality was very much grimmer. Armed with forged identity documents they settled in Avignon.Serge Klarsfeld: Le Mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France. Hrsg.: Fils et filles de déportés juifs de France. 2012
Arrest During the lunch hour on 13 March 1944 Ginette, her father Léon Cherkasky, her twelve-year-old brother Gilbert Cherkasky and her fourteen year old nephew, still in his school uniform, were arrested by a group of Gestapo and collaborationist militia men. Someone had denounced them to the authorities. It seems that the arresting officers had only "come for the men", but Ginette was also arrested because she protested over what was being done. Ginette herself had almost stayed outside and missed lunch entirely, enjoying the marvellous weather, but had been persuaded to join the family meal by her sister, who had pointed out that they were having roast veal for lunch. Her mother missed seeing the arrests, having been upstairs ill in bed at the time.
They were held initially at a detention facility in Avignon, and then, "for between ten and fourteen days", at the recently completed prison at Les Baumettes (Marseille). She noticed that everyone on the transfer bus between the two facilities was apparently Jewish. The boy seated next to her also carried clear scars of recent torture. The palms of his hands had been burned and his finger nails ripped out. It turned out that he was both Jewish and a Résistance activist. The horrors of Auschwitz still lay in the future, and Ginette was silently relieved that her only "crime" was that of being Jewish. At Les Baumettes she was separated from her father, brother and nephew, and placed in a cell with three other girls.
She was then taken to the nearby railway station where she saw with her male family members. Her father was chained to her little brother with handcuffs and her nephew was chained to Szlama Rozenberg, the father of Marceline. (Marceline Rozenberg, better known to posterity by her married name as Marceline Loridan-Ivens was a fellow detainee who later became a life-long friend.) The women were kept separate from the men, both on the platform and on the train, however, and the railway carriage in which they travelled was closely supervised by police and German soldiers. The train journey from Marseille to Lyon felt long, but they were not tied down for it. At Lyon they were transferred to a bus to Drancy, a suburb in the already sprawling conurbation to the north of Paris, felt (and was) longer.
Drancy The "Cité de la Muette" was a large modernist residential development on which, following much discussion and planning, work had commenced in 1932. It had been intended to incorporate extensive sports, social and cultural facilities, together with organised nursery provision and schools, a cinema, a library, a grocery store and, at the insistence of the diocese, a church. But during the 1930s the French economy had not bounced back from the Great Depression with the same level of deficit-funded vigour as that experienced in Germany or England. Reality for the "Cité de la Muette" project had involved frequent funding freezes. When war broke out and northern France fell under German control in 1940, only the vast apartment development, consisting of the U-shaped series of linked six-storey "towers", completed back in 1934, and an adjacent school, were more or less ready for use.
Between 1941 and 1944 the site was repurposed as the Drancy internment camp, initially administered by French police and later under the direct control of German Nazi paramilitaries. The bus transporting Ginette Cherkasky arrived at the facility on 31 March 1944, by which time Drancy was long-established as a transit camp for processing Jews from across France for onward transportation to death camps in the east of Germany.
Auschwitz Six weeks later, on 13 April 1944, a train carrying 1,499 or 1,500 Jews (sources differ) set off from Bobigny station, near to the Drancy camp. The train was composed of wagons originally intended for transporting livestock. This was the transport identified in records as "Convoi (Transport) n° 71". There were 624 males, 854 females and 22 whose genders went unrecorded. On 16 April 1944 the train reached the former goods station beside the Auschwitz concentration camp. 165 men from it were selected for forced labour and tattooed appropriately with their sequentially allocated numbers. 91 women were also picked out as labourers. Ginette was tattooed with the number "78599". The others were sent to the extermination facility to be killed by gassing. Her father, Léon Cherkasky, aged 61 and her brother Gilbert Cherkasky, aged 12, were among those immediately sent to be murdered. There was a truck waiting on the platform for those considered too weak to walk to the killing chambers. Unaware at this stage of its destination, Ginette urged her father and young brother to grab a place on the truck. They did so, and therefore were among the first to arrive at the killing location. The fate of Ginette's 14 year-old nephew remains unknown.
An early shock at the camp was the total absence of any sort of personal privacy. The nineteen year old had never seen even her sisters without clothes. Now she was forced to stand together with dozens of strange women stark naked. The slaughter of war had left Germany desperately short of working-age population, and much of the administration and upkeep at the concentration camp was carried out by trusted inmates. It was fellow prisoners who tattooed her number on her skin and shaved her head. After that she was given clothes - just an old sweater and a skirt: no underwear. Then they were sent to the shower. A few drops of water trickled out: "We looked at each other, naked, ashamed, skulls shaved, trembling and degraded. Humiliated."
Further tortures awaited the new arrivals when they came to the barrack hut where they were to be accommodated. Discipline was enforced by overseers and "kapos", fellow prisoners who had gained the confidence of the guards and thereby achieved promotion in the camp hierarchy. They beat the "junior" inmates at every opportunity. Violence was part of everyday life. If anyone failed to stand precisely in line for a roll call, if someone fell ill or was too weakened to work, or simply from the sadistic urges of the perpetrators, the outcome was physical assault". Half a century later, after she felt able to write it all down, Kolinka recalled that she had been "beaten the whole time, all through the day, for nothing, nothing, nothing". The other searing memory was the constant intense hunger. A piece of bread was precious and, if not eaten at once, must be well hidden. "Everyone stole from everyone".
Bergen-Belsen