Biography

Context

I – Civils status

A – Albert, his parents and his paternal grandmother

Joseph Eskenazi, Albert’s father, was born on April 22, 1895 in Varna, in Bulgaria ¹. Allegra Sarrano, his mother, was born on April 5, 1893 in Salonika, in Greece 2. They both came from Sephardic Jewish families. They left their homeland after the end of the First World War and the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and moved to France, probably in the hope of finding a more inclusive society. Joseph emigrated together with his mother, Sarah Bohora Mizrahi ³. According to all the records ⁴ in which Joseph’s nationality is listed, he was Romanian, despite the fact that Varna, the town in which he was born, was in Bulgaria. This town had long been dominated by the Ottoman Empire, but was incorporated into Bulgaria under the Treaty of Berlin in 1878 ⁵. The regions of Europe dominated by the Ottoman Empire, including Varna, were called Rumelia. ⁶. It is possible, therefore, that when French authorities recorded Joseph’s nationality, they got mixed up between Romania and Rumelia.
Joseph and Allegra arrived in Paris and first met in the 11^th district, a neighborhood which, in the 1920s, was home to a large number of migrants. Joseph worked as a travelling salesman ⁷. Joseph and Allegra both lived in the same building, at 27 rue Basfroi, and got married on October 8, 1929 ⁸. When their son, Albert Eskenazi was born, in 1931 ⁹, they were living with Albert’s paternal grandmother at 86 rue Galieni, in Joinville-le-Pont, southeast of Paris in the Val-de-Marne department of France. All four of them later moved to 5 rue Edmond Rostand in Champigny-sur-Marne, where they lived from 1931 to 1936 ¹⁰. By 1942, they were still living in the same street, but at number 41 ¹¹.

Albert was born on January 29, 1931 at 15 rue Santerre in the 12th district of Paris ^12. This would have been the Rothschild hospital, a health center that at that time treated only Jewish people¹³.

What are Sephardic Jews?

Sephardic Jews are the descendants of refugees from Spain and Portugal who, during the 15th century, were so persecuted that they had to flee the Iberian Peninsula.

Some 120,000 Jews left Spain, 90,000 of whom Sultan Bayezid II made welcome in the Ottoman Empire. The Sultan announced that he intended to grant asylum to all Jews fleeing Christian Europe. In the Ottoman Empire, Jews were mainly allowed to settle in the empire’s wealthiest cities, which were:

• in Rumelia (where Albert’s parents’ families hailed from), i.e. in the European provinces such as Constantinople, Sarajevo, Thessalonica and Varna
• In western and northern Anatolia, in Bursa and Aydin, for example
• And also in Mediterranean coastal areas, such as Jerusalem, Damascus and Cairo

Over the centuries, Thessalonica, in Greece, where Albert’s mother was born, became home to the largest number of Spanish Jews in the empire. During this period, the Jews’ status in the empire was relatively secure: they were granted religious freedom in return for paying a specific tax.

From the late 15th to the 17th century, Jewish emigrants settled mainly in two continents: Europe and Asia. Not all refugees or their descendants headed straight to the Ottoman Empire. Some took other migration routes: in some cases one or more generations moved to the Maghreb, Italy or other countries in Europe, for example. Later on, after Spain and Portugal, some of the various states on the Italian peninsula also expelled the Jews, which led to new migratory flows into the Ottoman Empire ¹⁴ .

The places that Albert and his family lived or passed through

Link to the map

Photographs taken by the students on May 7, 2024

5 rue Edmond Rostand in Champigny-sur-Marne

19 rue Edmond-Rostand in Champigny-sur-Marne

41 rue Edmond-Rostand in Champigny-sur-Marne

B – Avram and Victoria’s family

Albert Eskenazi and his family had a neighbor with the same surname: Avram Eskenazi. In 1936, together with his second wife Victoria Rebecca Abenrey, Avram was living at the same address as Albert, at 5, rue Edmond Rostand ¹⁵. By 1944, he was living at 19 rue Edmond Rostand Champigny-sur-Marne ¹⁶. We know that before that, Avram and his first wife, Sarah Ruben, lived at 36 and then at 26 rue Basfroi, in the 11^th district of Paris ¹⁷, just next door to Joseph and Allegra. We have searched for, but failed to find, any definite links between Albert’s and Avram’s families, but given that they were neighbors in Paris and then in Champigny-sur-Marne, they must have known each other well. Avram, an upholsterer, was born on February 3, 1888 in Istanbul ¹⁸. He and first wife, Sarah Ruben, had four sons, Samuel and Raphaël, who were born in 1913 and 1915 in Istanbul, then Isaac, born in 1920 in Paris and then Benjamin, born in 1925 in Joinville-le-Pont ¹⁹. After Sarah died, he got married again in 1935 in Champigny-sur-Marne ²⁰ to Victoria Rebecca Aberney, a divorcee born in 1887 in Istanbul ²¹. In 1936, they were living with Cadoum, Victoria’s mother and three of Avram’s sons, Samuel, Raphaël and Benjamin, in the same house as Albert and his family ²².

II – The arrests of Albert’s family and friends

A- Albert’s parents

Both of Albert’s parents, Joseph and Allegra, were deported on Convoy 37 on September 25, 1942 ²³. We think they may have been rounded up the previous day. On September 24, 1942, the French police, acting on the orders of the Nazi occupiers, rounded up 1,578 Romanian Jews in Paris and the inner suburbs, who were then deported in convoys 37 and 38 ²⁴. We have no record of when Joseph and Allegra died: they never returned from Auschwitz alive, so must have been murdered there.

Memorial at the entrance to the former Drancy internment camp. A cattle car testifies to the appalling conditions in which Jews were deported to Auschwitz.

B – Avram and Victoria Rebecca

Avram was arrested on March 20, 1944 in the Parc district of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, in the Val-de-Marne department of France ²⁵. He was arrested “on racial grounds” but we discovered that his son, Benjamin, later applied to have him granted the status of “political deportee” (meaning that he was deported for political reasons) ²⁶. This request was backed up by the testimony of Lucien Eskenazi, who was also arrested and interned at Drancy, and who witnessed Avram’s arrest. Lucien was deported to Auschwitz but survived ²⁷. We therefore assume that Avram was a member of the Resistance. A week after he was arrested, Avram was deported to Auschwitz on Convoy 70 on March 27, 1944, where he was murdered as soon as he arrived on April 1, 1944²⁸.

Victoria Rebecca Abenrey Eskenazi was also arrested, and before her husband. She was interned in Drancy on February 26, 1944, and then deported to Auschwitz on Convoy 69 on March 7, 1944 ²⁹. She too died there, murdered on arrival on March 12, 1944 ³⁰. We have no information about the circumstances surrounding her arrest.

III- Albert arrested and deported

A- Albert at the UGIF center

After his parents and his grandmother died ³¹, Albert Eskenazi became an orphan. We know that Albert was staying a children’s home run by the UGIF (Union Générale des Israelites de France, or General Union of French Jews) in July 1944, but we were unable to find out when he arrived there. Might it have been just after his parents were deported, or might Avram and Victoria have taken him in, meaning that he arrived their only after they too were deported? The UGIF home where Albert stayed was at 70 avenue Secrétan, in the 19th district of Paris ³². On July 21 and 22, 1944, SS officer Aloïs Brunner, who was the commandant of Drancy camp and the man in charge of deporting the Jews from France, ordered roundups in the seven UGIF homes in and around Paris ³³. Albert, along with 78 children and 19 adults, all of whom were staying at the UGIF home on avenue Secrétan at the time, were arrested. They were interned briefly in Drancy, and then deported to Auschwitz on July 30, 1944, aboard Convoy 77 ³⁴.

B – Albert on convoy 77

After the journey in a cattle car in appalling conditions, which took three days and three nights, Albert arrived in Auschwitz. He was too young, at 13, to be deemed able to work, so was murdered in the gas chambers in Birkenau, asphyxiated by Zyklon B gas. His official date of death is August 5, 1944 ³⁸ .

What were UGIF centers?

UGIF (Union Générale des Israélites de France) centers were children’s homes where Jewish children, most of them orphans, were placed. They were set up according to a law passed by the Vichy regime, which worked in collaboration with the Nazis, on November 29, 1941. The UGIF centers were originally Jewish schools, which then began to take in Jewish orphans ³⁵. As a result, Jewish children were brought together in one place. The UGIF centers thus contributed to gathering as many Jews as possible in one place, which facilitated roundups.

There is now a memorial plaque in front of the former UGIF center on avenue Secrétan, unveiled in 2014, which commemorates all the people who were rounded up there and subsequently deported.³⁶

Convoy 77: the last of the death trains

Convoy 77 was the last of the major deportation transports of Jews in Europe. The people to be deported from France were interned in Drancy camp and then transferred to Bobigny station, where they were loaded onto a train bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau ³⁷.

Convoy 77 left Drancy for Auschwitz on July 31, 1944, carrying 1306 people, many of them children and teenagers, many of them foreign Jews who had taken refuge in France, as well as some French Jews who had been arrested during earlier roundups. When they arrived at Auschwitz, the majority of the deportees on Convoy 77 were sent straight to the gas chambers, where they were murdered.

This convoy was the last to leave France before Paris was liberated, in August 1944.

Auschwitz-Birkenau: a hybrid camp, the deadliest of all during the genocide