Biography of Kalman Weiss

We are a group of 9th and 10th grade students from the French International High School in Bratislava, Slovakia. During the 2023-2024 school year, we volunteered to take part in the “Convoy 77” project, accompanied by Ms. Girault, our German teacher, and Ms. Casale, our history and geography teacher.

Every Monday, we gathered together to research and write the biography of Kalman Weiss, who was deported along with his daughter, Juliette Weiss, on one of the last deportation convoys to Auschwitz

 

Why Kalman Weiss?

We decided to focus on Kalman Weiss because he originally came from Nitra, a town near Bratislava in Slovakia, before he emigrated to France. Since we attend a French-Slovakian school, we felt him to be an ideal person to study.

From Slovakia to France

Kalman was born on December 30, 1878 near the town of Nitra (Nyitra) in Horné Lefantovce  (Felso Elefant) which at that time was in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He lived in a small Jewish community with his parents, Ignatz Weiss and Mali Adler. According to the sources, he was their first child. We therefore suppose that he may have been the eldest of a sibling group, but we found no evidence that he had any brothers or sisters.

 

 

 

Kalman arrived in France towards the end of the 19th century or early in the 20th century, but we have been unable to determine exactly when he emigrated. it is safe to assume that he decided to leave Slovakia following the pogroms that targeted Jews throughout Eastern Europe in the 19th century.

When he first arrived in France, Kalman Weiss lived on the outskirts of Paris, in Rue Zacharie, which is now located in the municipality of Sartrouville, in the Yvelines department of France. He then moved to 142 rue de la Pompe, in the 16th district of Paris.

On January 10, 1903, he married Clotilde Vuillermet, a dressmaker born on September 3, 1880 at La Motte-Servolex in the Savoie department of France. It appears that the year before they married, Kalman and Clotilde had had a daughter, Juliette Marcelle Weiss, who was born on December 22, 1902.

Juliette’s birth certificate identifies her mother as Clotilde Vuillermet, but the father’s name is not listed. Juliette became Kalman’s legitimate daughter when her parents got married, on January 10, 1903.

 

 

In order to better integrate into French society, Kalman changed his first name to Armand. The name Kalman derives from German. Nevertheless, in some official documents, he continued to use his birth name. For example, on the marriage certificate published in the French Official Gazette, his name is given as “Armand”, whereas in the civil registry records, it is “Kalman”. Kalman Weiss became a French citizen in 1925.

Kalman was a furrier, meaning he was a merchant who specialized in skins and furs. This was a common occupation for people who migrated to France. He set up shop at 37 rue des Belles Feuilles, in the 16th district of Paris, just 200 yards or so from his apartment. We discovered that his business was impounded on December 18, 1944. The Chamber of Commerce and Industry official bulletin dated December 26, 1914, states that Kalman Weiss’s nationality was “Austrian”

From Drancy to Auschwitz-Birkenau

On July 18, 1944, the French militia arrested Kalman Weiss, then a widower aged 65, together with his daughter ,Juliette Marcelle Weiss, who was 42. They were interned at Drancy for 13 days prior to being deported. Kalman was assigned the serial number 25224 and Juliette the number 25225.

Drancy internment camp was the main hub of anti-Semitic deportation policy in France from August 1941 to August 1944. Located northeast of Paris, in the town of Drancy (then in the Seine department, now in Seine-Saint-Denis), the camp was used to intern Jews before they were deported from Le Bourget station (1942-1943) and then Bobigny station (1943-1944) to Nazi extermination camps, mainly Auschwitz. Nine out of ten Jews deported from France spent time in Drancy during the Holocaust.

In October 1940, the Vichy regime enacted a law on the status of Jews, which defined “the Jewish race […] [as] any person born of three grandparents of the Jewish race”. Kalman Weiss and Juliette Weiss, who were both French and Jewish, were deported from Drancy to Auschwitz on July 31, 1944 on Convoy 77.

The train arrived in Auschwitz on August 3, 1944. Kalman Weiss was later officially declared to have died on August 5, 1944. His death certificate bears the words “died during deportation”. A deportation certificate was issued to, Geneviève Ollivier, an employee at Kalman Weiss’s store, on September 7, 1945.