The 77th Convoy
Yvan Leclère
The last convoy
When the 77th convoy left the camp at Drancy on 31 July 1944, destined for Auschwitz, Paris was already waiting for liberation. The Allies had already landed in Normandy on 6 June. However, Alois Brunner, the SS commandant of Drancy, intensified roundups to form a convoy of at least 1,310 Jewish deportees, including more than 300 children. Upon arrival at Auschwitz, the majority of them were sent to the gas chambers. Only 251 deportees survived the camps.
The ‘Convoy 77’ project invites students to research and rebuild the lives of the 1,310 deportees. It was launched in 2015 by the Convoi 77 association (created by descendants of the deportees) and is supported by the French Ministry of Education, the French President, the European Union and many other organisations.
Eight lives
During the spring of 2020, my ninth grade students researched eight deportees who, according to the convoy list, were born in Lithuania. Our investigations were lengthy and very moving, completed in difficult lockdown conditions where contact with my students and the archives could only take place online. Yet, thanks to a long quest through the archives of different countries (France, Lithuania, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the United States) and extraordinarily rich genealogical websites, complemented by information from the families of the deportees and other contacts, eight lives have been rebuilt. Now we may say that Abraham Delberg, Zofia Borensztejn, Doba and Berthe/Basia Levine, Henri/Henoch Levin, Aron Simanovitch, Walter/Wole Zavadier and Salomon Zilber are more than names on a list of deportees.
Abraham Delberg arrived in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century, shortly after completing his military service in the Russian army. He settled down with his wife, Sarah, and began work as a tailor. During the German occupation, he was robbed before being arrested.
Henoch Levin, from Vilnius, arrived in Paris in 1926 to study medicine. In 1939, after the outbreak of the Second World War, he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion and francized his name. After the 1940 armistice, however, the collaborationist and xenophobic Vichy regime subjected former foreign volunteers to forced labour. In Auschwitz, Henri Levin survived until the evacuation of the camp in 1944, suffered and survived a death march, but sadly died in Mauthausen in March 1945.
Last spring, a class of mine in the International French Lyceum of Vilnius had the opportunity to take part in the project ‘Convoy 77’, inquiring about the life of eight deportees of the last large convoy from the Drancy camp near Paris to Auschwitz in 1944 – the 77th Convoy. Our work is one of eleven projects to be honoured during a ceremony by French President Emmanuel Macron on 27 January 2021: an extraordinary ceremony for an extraordinary project.