Ginette Kolinka, a 101-year-old Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor, has become a formidable campaigner against antisemitism in France, crediting Steven Spielberg for helping her to open up about her experiences. In her memoir, Return to Birkenau, she recalls how a 1997 interview for the director's Shoah Foundation prompted her to share the horrors she had buried for decades.
After the release of Schindler’s List in 1993, Spielberg launched the foundation to collect testimonies from Holocaust survivors. Initially reluctant, Kolinka eventually spoke for nearly three hours, recounting the trauma of her arrest in March 1944 and her deportation to the Nazi death camp. “For the first time, I found myself compelled to think about it again,” she writes.
Kolinka now dedicates herself to ensuring the lessons of the Holocaust are not forgotten, speaking to school pupils across France. During a recent visit to the Marcelin Berthelot high school east of Paris, she described the journey in windowless cattle wagons, the nudity forced upon arrival, and the tattooed number 78599 on her arm. “The Nazis' hatred of Jews was such that they hunted for every detail that could make us suffer, humiliate us,” she told students who listened in silence.
She was among a few hundred prisoners selected for forced labour rather than immediate death in the gas chambers. Of the 76,000 Jews deported from France during the Second World War, only 2,500 survived. Kolinka is now the most prominent remaining French survivor, with fewer than 30 still alive, according to the Union of Auschwitz Deportees.
Asked about the horrors she endured, Kolinka delivers a stark warning: “If I had a child, well, I would prefer to strangle them with my own hands than make them go through what I went through.” Her testimony, she hopes, will prevent future generations from claiming ignorance of the Holocaust.
