Michel Marius NORDON (1898 to 1944)

Photo source: NORDON-Michel-DAVCC-21-P-520-981-7

We are a group of 9th grade students from Les Blés D’or middle school in Bailly Romainvilliers, in the Seine-et-Marne department of France. We decided to participate in the Convoy 77 project in order to learn more about the people who were deported during the Second World War. This involves writing a biography as a tribute to a person who was deported during the Holocaust. Four of us worked on this biography: Wissem, Codou, Océane and Ambre, with the guidance of Ms. Jorrion, our French teacher, and Ms. Garilliere. our history and geography teacher. We focused on a deportee called Michel Marius Nordon. We based our research on various resources we were given and also on online records from the Shoah Memorial, Convoy 77 and the Paris archives websites. We were also able to gain a better understanding of what life was like for deportees by visiting the Les Milles camp, in the Bouches-de-Rhône department of France.

Source: Paris archives website

Michel Marius Nordon was born on at 6:00 p.m. on September 11, 1898 at 30 rue des Poissonniers in the 18th district of Paris. We found his birth certificate in the City of Paris digital archives. It reveals that his parents were Maurice Nordon and Jeanne Thérèse Isaac. His mother was just 20 years old when he was born, and worked in the cravat-making trade, while his father, who was 24, was a traveling salesman. They were already married and were living at 32 rue d’Aubervilliers, in the 19th district, at the time. Michel Marius Nordon was a French citizen by birth and Jewish by descent. The family later moved to 13 rue Riquet, also in the 19th disrcit of Paris.

When the First World War broke out in 1914, Michel Nordon was only 16 years old, so too young to fight because he was below the age of majority in France, which was 21 in those days. He went on to work in sales. He married a young woman called Louise Marie Jeanne Rousseau at 11:10 a.m. on July 12, 1928. He was 30 years old at the time, was a street peddler and was living at 5 passage Kuszner in Paris. Louise, who was born on February 10, 1901 in the 20th district of Paris, worked in the shoe trade. She was living with her parents at 5 rue du Plateau, where her mother, Eugénie Rousseau née Bachelet was the concierge. Her father, Camille Rousseau, did not attend the wedding. The witnesses were Pierre Rousseau, a plumber, who was probably Louise’s brother and Joseph Calves, a salesman who lived in Montreuil, in the eastern outskirts of Paris.

 

Source: Paris archives website

Michel, who was 41 years old when the Second World war broke out in 1939, was not called up. Records held by the French Ministry of Defense Historical Service, in Caen[1] reveal that he was living at  27 rue de Sambre-et-Meuse in the 10th district of Paris at the time. There is no mention of any children in his file. The Vichy regime’s anti-Jewish legislation must surely have had a big impact on his life. Did he wear the yellow star as he was supposed to? It appears that like many other French people, he decided to join the Resistance, and wrote articles in their newspapers. It was for that reason that the Gestapo went to his home to arrest him on July 11, 1944. He was 46 years old by then.

After he was arrested, he was taken to Fresnes prison, south of Paris, where many Resistance fighters were interrogated. The Germans must have realized very early on that he was Jewish, so transferred him to Drancy internment camp, north of Paris. He had 546 francs in cash on him, which was confiscated when arrived there on July 14, 1944. A fortnight later, early in the morning of July 31, 1944, he was put on a bus bound for the nearby Bobigny station. He was then loaded into a cattle car and deported to Auschwitz Birkenau on Convoy 77, along with 1305 other people. The journey lasted 3 days and 3 nights, in appalling conditions: the deportees were crammed together and there was no drinking water and no sanitary facilities.

After the war, Marcel was officially declared to have died on August 5, 1944, just 5 days after he left Drancy. If there was no further news of the deportees, and since children and seniors were sent to the gas chambers and murdered soon after they arrived in Auschwitz, the French authorities deemed them all to have died on August 5. This date thus appears on the death certificates of a large number of people who were deported on Convoy 77[2]. We therefore assume that when Marcel arrived on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, he was not selected to enter the camp for forced labor but sent straight to the gas chambers. He was only 46, so was young enough to be selected for work, but what was his physical condition like? Did he decide to get into one of the ambulance-like trucks with red crosses on them, which were waiting near the ramp and in fact took people straight to the gas chambers? Was he too weak to work as a result of food shortages during the war and after his arrest? Whatever the reason, the Nazis did not select him for forced labor.

 

 

Source: Convoi 77 NORDON-Michel-DAVCC-21-P-520-981-11

His wife did everything she could to track him down at the end of the war. She was the one who requested the search for him as a “non-returned person”. She then asked for a copy of his file in order to keep a record of his terrible ordeal.

 

File on Michel Nordon, requested by his wife, Louise Nordon.
Source: Convoi77 NORDON-Michel-DAVCC-21-P-520-981-15

 

Notes & references

[1] © Victims of Contemporary Conflicts Archives Division of the Ministry of Defense Historical Service, in Caen, file on NORDON Michel, ref. DAVCC 21 P 520 981

[2] This was the date set by the French authorities, but in reality, the Convoy 77 deportees who were selected to be sent to the gas chambers were actually killed on the day they arrived, August 3, 1944.