André WEIL

I am Mickaël Pinot, a 41 year old history and geography teacher from Réunion island. I have been teaching in Réunion since 2005 and at the Mille Roches secondary school since 2009. I have always been a strong believer in project-based learning and am always keen to pass on memories of past events to my students. The Convoy 77 project provides a perfect opportunity to combine the two.
Teaching students about the Holocaust is never easy, and perhaps even more challenging for those of us outside of Europe, where the tragic events of the genocide are geographically more distant and less well-remembered.
The Convoy 77 project has thus enabled me to bring this tragic story to light and make it more real to the students, while also getting them involved in researching and writing about it.
When we were sent the records relating to André Weil, we thought about how best to write his life story and eventually decided on an imaginary posthumous autobiography. We felt that this would bring the story to life and enable readers to identify with it on a more personal level.
We examined the archives as a class, but the students split into groups to write separate parts of the story (birth/family, resistance, arrest/deportation, post-war searches, etc.). One group was then responsible for formatting the final document.
We have also submitted a request for a Stolpersteine, (a type of memorial stone) to be laid in the sidewalk outside André Weil’s former home in Lyon, in order to raise awareness of what happened there in the past.

Biography of André Weil

An archive file, the story of a life, all that remains of my existence. Let me tell you all about myself.

My name is André Weil and I was born on June 7, 1904, right at the start of the 20th century, in Hatten, a small village in Alsace, in what is now the Bas-Rhin department of France.

At that time, Alsace was no longer in France, but part of Germany, which means that I was actually born German.

My family was Jewish, and my parents were Armand Weil and Alice Wolf. There were a lot of Jews living in Alsace at that time, in a mixed community of Jews, Catholics and Protestants, all living together in perfect harmony.

When the First World War broke out in 1914, I was just a young boy, but I can still remember it. At the end of the war, my beloved Alsace became French again and I became a French citizen on December 31, 1920.

As the years went by, I finished my education and when I was 29, in 1933, I married Lucie Fanny. Come to think of it, that was the year Hitler came to power in Germany. A sad coincidence, a terrible omen, with far-reaching consequences that I could never possibly have imagined…

We celebrated our wedding in a little town called Muttersholtz in Alsace.

We were blessed with two beautiful children, Claude, who was born on September 11, 1934, and Colette, born shortly afterwards on September 19, 1935. They emerged into a world that was becoming increasingly unpredictable and unstable, and all over Europe, dark clouds were gathering on the horizon.

In 1939, when Germany invaded Poland and the Second World War broke, along with many young French men, I was called up and joined the army.

The defeat that followed in June 1940 was not only a national but also a personal disaster: we had lost to the Boche. When the armistice was signed, my much-loved region of Alsace was annexed into the German Reich once again, and found itself tossed back and forth across the Rhine. History always seems to repeat itself.

Life in Alsace grew increasingly difficult for Jews, and we decided to leave. We fled south to the free zone and set up home in Lyon, a city in the Rhône department of France that we thought would be a safe haven for us.

My time in Lyon in 1943-1944

When we got there, we found accommodation right in the heart of Lyon, at 185 Cours Lafayette. I set up a business there, selling knives mainly, and I found a warehouse to store my stock at 19 Rue Dumoulin in the 7th district of Lyon.

Meanwhile, although it was very risky, I decided to join the Resistance. I don’t like to think of myself as a hero, but I decided to take in people who had refused to take part in the Service du Travail Obligatoire (Compulsory Labor Service), more commonly known as the “STO”.

One of the people I helped to hide was Jacques Rosabrunette, an escaped prisoner of war who stayed with me from October 1943 to June 1944.

On July 18, 1944, two officers from the French Militia, Marshall Pétain’s police force, came to my warehouse to arrest me because someone had reported me. Two or three days later, two people went back to seize my stock: a Mr. Moreau Laurent witnessed the whole thing and later testified as to what happened.

I neither know nor understand who turned me in, or why. What could have prompted such malicious act against a fellow citizen? Anti-Semitism, perhaps, pure hatred of Jews? Or maybe the fact that I was sheltering people who were resisting the STO?

I shall never know, but it still haunts my soul, even now.

My apartment in Lyon was looted the same day as I was arrested.

I was transferred to Montluc prison in Lyon on July 18, 1944, and there I was tortured and interrogated in an attempt to make me talk and reveal the names of my friends in the Resistance. I said nothing.

On July 24, 1944 a group of us were transferred to Drancy, a notorious transit camp just north of Paris.

We were interned there, in awful conditions, until July 31, 1944, when we set off on a journey into the unknown.

We traveled by train, in wagons that were normally used to transport animals, on Convoy 77. Like so many others before us, we had to endure the horror of deportation: the journey took three days, with no food and little water, in overcrowded cattle cars with no sanitary facilities, in the scorching heat of July. We arrived in the early hours of August 3, 1944.

I perished, as did hundreds of thousands of other people, in that macabre camp in Poland, Auschwitz.

Some people died on the journey, so did not even make it to the camp alive. When we arrived, the train doors were flung open and were met by German soldiers with dogs, who shouted and screamed at us, and hit us. The selection took place immediately.

I was among the people who were selected to be taken straight to the gas chambers. We had to get undressed and go into a huge room, not knowing what was about to happen to us. Zyklon B gas was poured into the room. We soon realized what was happening, and death swiftly followed.

I can’t bear to describe what they did with our bodies; it’s all in the history books.

After I died and after the war, I watched from above as Alice tried to make sense of what had happened, and why I wasn’t there.

She could hardly believe that I was no longer in the world. She clung to the news of how the Russian army had liberated some deported Jews in Upper Silesia. Sadly, I was not among them.

She made numerous attempts to clarify the circumstances surrounding my disappearance and to have the French state acknowledge my Resistance work. Ever hopeful, she eventually succeeded having me officially declared missing, and received a signed certificate dated August 8, 1947.

Thanks to my wife and some witnesses who knew me, my Resistance activities during the war were also acknowledged and on November 24, 1955, I was declared to have “Died for France”.

Thus ends my story. Some would say I died in vain: a future shattered, and for nothing.

Like so many others, I did what I thought was best for my country, based on our shared republican values.

I have no regrets, other than to have left behind a widow and orphans, to whom I dedicate this narrative.