New photo British author pays tribute to his relatives who were on Convoy 62 death train to Auschwitz

Exactly 75 years ago, Michael Rosen’s great uncle and aunt boarded a train in Paris which took them to their deaths in a Nazi concentration camp.

Today the British author, poet, illustrator and former Children’s Laureate was in the French capital at a moving ceremony remembering all those who were murdered on the infamous Convoy 62.

Tuesday’s solemn anniversary marked some 15 years of research by London-based Mr Rosen, 72, who was determined to piece together the story of Oscar ‘Jeschie’ Rosen, who was 48 when he died, and his wife, Rachel, 33.

‘There are so many people who lost mothers, fathers, uncles and aunts, and other family members – the ceremony paid tribute to more than a thousand people from Convoy 62 who were killed,’ said Mr Rosen.

British author Michael Rosen, 72, (pictured) travelled to Paris to pay tribute to his great aunt and uncle

Oscar ‘Jeschie’ Rosen, who was 48 when he died, and his wife, Rachel, 33, died after being taken to Aushwitz on the infamous convoy 62 death train

Thousands of Jews were loaded onto trains which were then taken to death camps like Auschwitz throughout the war

‘It was very moving, and it’s vitally important that these kind of ceremonies continue to be held. The world needs to know how genocide happens.

‘Family in America only recently sent me pictures of Jeschie and Rachel – they had been hidden in a sealed box up until 2016.’

Today Mr Rosen inspected Jeschie and Rachel’s names enshrined at the Paris Holocaust Memorial wall and, in pouring rain and freezing cold, read out their names, along with those of others murdered at Auschwitz concentration camp, then in Occupied Poland and part of the Third Reich.

By grim coincidence, Jeschie was born in Oswiecim – the town where Auschwitz camp was situated – and worked as a clock mender during the 1930s, after serving in the Austro-Hungarian Army with Germany’s Imperial forces during the First World War.

He and Rachel originally fled Sedan, the French town in the Ardennes on the German border, following the Second World War German Blitzkrieg of 1940.

They ended up in Niort, in western France, where ‘Aryanisation’ laws meant they had to wear yellow stars and declare their family firm a ‘Jewish Business’.

As persecution intensified, they made their way to Nice, where they hoped to travel to North Africa by boat.

The holocaust memorial in Paris pays tribute to the victims of the Holocaust and names each one

Michael Rosen's relatives' names are among those on the wall as they were killed during the Nazi occupation of France

‘Bernard Montgomery had won his desert campaigns, and many Jews thought they could find safe haven across the Mediterranean.

‘Instead the Nazis came to the Excelsior Hotel in Nice, where Jeschie and Rachel were within a couple of days of sailing. They were transported to the Drancy internment camp.’

Drancy, in a northern Paris suburb, had been run by French police up until July 1943, and by December the SS were in charge, and organising mass ‘expulsions’.

Madeleine Levy, the 25-year-old granddaughter of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish Army officer at the centre of an anti-Semitism scandal in France in the 1890s, was also killed

Spurious reasons including ‘listening to Radio London’ and ‘black market activities’ were used to criminalise Jews, who were described as ‘undesirables’.

A telex from Heinz Rothke, the SS chief of the Department of Jewish Affairs, to Adolf Eichmann in Berlin confirmed that at 11.50am on November 1943 a convoy of 1,200 Jews, including 150 children, would leave Paris-Bobigny station.

Five days later, on November 25 2018, officials at Auschwitz reported that 1181 had arrived, and that 19 had escaped en route.

They were mainly young men who had smuggled a saw on board the train, cut through the floor of a wagon, and dropped out when the convoy slowed down in a tunnel while still in France.

The escapees included Jean Cahen-Salvador, who ended up escaping to neutral Switzerland with his wife and two young children.

Cahen-Salvador became a senior civil servant and industrialist, and lived until 1995, but the vast majority of those aboard Convoy 62 were murdered.

Many were gassed on arrival at Auschwitz and by 1945, a total of just 29 were still alive. These included all the children, some under the age of one.

Those killed included Madeleine Levy, the 25-year-old granddaughter of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish Army officer at the centre of an anti-Semitism scandal in France in the 1890s.

Exactly 1,200 Jews were rounded up and sent to Auschwizt-Birkenau (pictured) on Convoy 62

Today Mr Rosen inspected Jeschie and Rachel’s names enshrined at the Paris Holocaust Memorial wall

Some 67,000 French, Polish and German Jews were deported from Drancy between June 1942 and July 1944.

They were brutalised not just by the Nazis, but by French police and paramilitaries, and then entrained on wagons belonging to SNCF, France’s national railway.

It is only in recent years that the French have begun to acknowledged the part they played in the Holocaust.

It was as recently as 1995 that the then conservative president Jacques Chirac finally publically admitted that French police and other authority figures had helped arrest 13,152 Jews on two days – July 16 and 17 1942 – in Paris.

They included more than 4,000 children, and all were held at the so-called Vel d’Hiv cycle stadium before being entrained to camps such as Auschwitz.

Mr Chirac said in 1995: ‘Yes, French people, the French state, assisted the occupier in its criminal madness.’

The release of crucial records – including those of the collaborating Paris police – have made the work of historical researchers far easier.

Mr Rosen is now planning to produce a mix of prose and poetry, pictures and maps which tell the story of Jeschie and Rachel.

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News Pictures British author pays tribute to his relatives who were on Convoy 62 death train to Auschwitz

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