Denise Holstein (6 February 1927 – 16 November 2024) was a French Auschwitz concentration camp survivor and Holocaust witness, who was liberated on 15 April 1945.
[1][2] As a Holocaust witness, Holstein tells her story in two books and in a documentary made by a student from the Lycée Corneille in Rouen.
[5][6] Her father, Bernard Holstein, was born in Kaunas in the Russian Empire (now Lithuania) on 20 August 1890 and was a dental surgeon.
In 1939, as a reserve officer, Bernard Holstein was mobilised as a lieutenant and was tasked with the responsibility for the Gueules cassées servicemen in the 3rd military region, that was constituted at the Rouen hospital.
Denise and her brother Jean fled from the German advance with their maternal grandmother and great-grandmother in an exodus that led them initially to Vierzon and then finally to Avignon where they joined the rest of their family.
[6] The family returned to Rouen when their father, Bernard was given permission to continue working as a dentist.
[6] On that day, two hundred and twenty adults and children from the department were arrested on the orders of the prefect André Parmentier, who had not even asked for authorisation from his superiors in the French occupied zone.
As an orphan, she benefited from the help of the Union générale des israélites de France (UGIF) and did not return to the Drancy camp.
[4] She was first accommodated at the Guy Patin home, which took in children whose parents had been deported while attending the Lamartine high school, then at the Lamarck street centre.
[4] On 22 July 1944, the Nazi officer and anti-semite Alois Brunner decided to round up all the occupants of the children's homes.
One child was Samuel Przemisliawski, who was deported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, as the son of a prisoner of war.
[6] Holstein stated that when a deportee complained, the pollacks (derogatory reference to a person of Polish descent) who tattooed her would push the needles in even deeper.
In December 1990, Holstein was invited to lay a commemorative plaque in Louveciennes, in memory of the children deported from the UGIF centre.
[6] There she met the Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld,[6] who challenged her as to her duty to testify as a holocaust witness.
In the last part, a historical study by Françoise Bottois, a secondary school history teacher in Rouen, provides a better understanding of the annihilation of the Jews in the town between 1940 and 1943.