Survivor Profiles: Marion Deichmann
The only thing I did remember was we were in danger. We were hunted like animals – wild animals – and our life was in danger but you can’t really have a conception of death when you are seven.
Marion Deichmann
Her Story:
Holocaust Survivor Marion Deichmann was born in Germany shortly before Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933. Her middle-class German Jewish family could not imagine that all of continental Europe would capitulate and be occupied by the Nazis. Marion and her mother, Alice, fled Luxembourg and manage to get to the Belgium/France border, eventually joining Alice’s mother in Paris. When Marion was 9 years old, her mother was arrested in the Vel d’Hiv roundups, the mass arrests of Jews in Paris in July 1942. Alice was sent first to Drancy and then to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Marion never saw her again.
With the help of the French Resistance, Marion was moved around, staying in homes with different families until a social worker connected to the French Resistance, Martha Laborde, placed Marion with the Parigny family in Normandy. When D-Day arrived, the family fled to the countryside. Later, Marion returned to Paris in the hopes of reuniting with her mother, but eventually learned that she was murdered in Auschwitz. Her book, Her Name Shall Remain Unforgotten, is dedicated to her mother.
Photo credits: Andrew Brooke