Marion Deichmann was nine years old when her mother was arrested in the Vél’ d’Hiv round-up in Paris and sent to a Nazi concentration camp.
“Two militia came to our little apartment and said, ‘we’ve come to collect Alice Deichmann’,” Marion, now 91, recalls. “We knew that there were working camps, but nobody knew then about the ‘final solution’ – the plan to exterminate Jews in a gas chamber. So my mother was taken. I remember the last thing she said to me was, ‘be good, I’ll be back’.”
Alice was sent to the Drancy transit camp on the outskirts of Paris, and it was only decades later – long after the second world war – that Deichmann received confirmation that her mother had been taken to Auschwitz and murdered.
For years, Deichmann struggled to discuss her experiences of the Holocaust, even with her own children. But now she has worked closely with the director Darren Emerson on Letters from Drancy, a virtual-reality documentary that brings her story to life.
“I was born in Karlsrühe, Germany, in November 1932, six weeks before Hitler’s appointment as chancellor,” she says. “And as you know, the Jews had to leave because of the racial laws.”
Deichmann was 16 months old when her family moved to Luxembourg after her father lost his job. When her parents separated, her father escaped to Brazil, while she and her mother remained. By the time Alice decided to emigrate, it was already too late to leave Europe.
The pair managed to get to Brussels, where they found a truck driver to sneak them across the border into France, eventually joining Alice’s mother in Paris.
“[In Paris] the Nazis had all kinds of procedures,” Deichmann recalls. “You had to put down your name if you wanted to work, but it was only to better able to take you in. There was no escape.”
She added: “It was only when the French saw six-year-old children wearing the yellow star and being picked up that the tide turned and many people went into the resistance.”
After her mother’s arrest, the French Resistance came to relocate Deichmann. “That evening somebody came and said, ‘you can’t stay here any more, they’ll come back for you’. So I went into hiding, and so did my grandmother,” she said.
Deichmann was moved around, staying in different homes until a social worker connected her with the Parigny family in Normandy, who took her in as one of their own. When D-day arrived, the family’s home and the cafe they owned were destroyed along with much of their village. As a child, she says, she could tell the difference between the American, British and German planes.
When the war ended, and Deichmann returned to Paris to be reunited with her grandmother and uncle, the family began the work of trying to find Alice. “We had a picture of my mother and asked everybody if they’d seen her. For a long, long time, nobody had seen her, and for a long, long time I still hoped she’d be alive,” Deichmann says.
Eventually, that hope gave way to an unimaginable reality: “Immediately on arrival [at Auschwitz], she went to the gas chamber.
“I learned that in 1982, when I was in my 50s. Nobody could say exactly, because there were no survivors. But I learned through lawyers who did research that my mother went to Auschwitz on 27 July 1942. She was on convoy number 12. Her name was not on the list of those who came out.”
Though she continued with her life after the war – emigrating to the US, marrying and having children before returning to France – Deichmann says she has never been able to fully say goodbye to her mother.
“Gone, really? She just walked out the door. All human societies have rituals, funerals to say goodbye. I have not had that. Like the soldiers in Normandy, many of them couldn’t be identified, they just found the body. But at least they found the body. I had nothing.”
Sometimes, she says, she would even dream that her mother was living a quiet life somewhere in Russia.
“My mother meant everything to me. Just everything. She was a very modern woman. She was well-educated, she played the piano all the time. There’s a painting of her which was painted in Germany in 1929 that hangs in my living room today. For me she’s eternally alive. She lives within me.”
Letters from Drancy, which takes its name from the letters Alice sent Marion from the internment camp, has its UK premiere at the London film festival on Friday.
Revisiting sites of trauma for the film, including the Paris apartment from where her mother was taken, was “terrible” for Deichmann. The toughest visit was to Drancy, from where her mother was taken by cattle car to Auschwitz. “It was a 60-hour journey, standing up without water, without anything. When I saw the cattle cars for the first time, I broke down and cried.”
But, Deichmann says, she is also “elated” that her story was chosen for this film. In recent years, she has been chronicling her experiences, both in her 2012 book, Her Name Shall Remain Unforgotten, and her regular visits to schools.
“I don’t want my mother’s story to die. My crusade is to make sure we all remember, so this won’t happen ever again.”
Letters from Drancy will be shown at the Bargehouse at Oxo Tower 6-22 October. Marion Deichmann and Darren Emerson are also giving a talk on Sunday.
