Steven Spielberg helps 101-year-old Auschwitz survivor become warrior against antisemitism

SAINT-MAUR-DES-FOSSÉS, France — After surviving Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ginette Kolinka developed a stock answer to shut down questioners who’d ask about her experiences of the Nazi death camp and its horrors.

“‘If I had a child, well, I would prefer to strangle them with my own hands than make them go through what I went through,’” she’d tell them.

“For me, that was an answer that said it all,” Kolinka says.

Now, at the tail end of a remarkably long and fruitful life, the feisty 101-year-old with an easy and generous smile has become a mighty warrior against antisemitism in France, seeing purpose in sharing her firsthand insight into murderous hatred and inhumanity.

So the lessons of the Holocaust aren’t forgotten.

So people who tune in to the countless interviews she gives cannot say that they didn’t know about the death camps and the extermination of six million European Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators.

So school pupils who are thrilled to meet and listen to Kolinka inherit and embrace the duty of remembrance.

‘Schindler’s List’ was a turning point

Kolinka credits Steven Spielberg for helping to precipitate her decision 30 years ago to start opening up about the mental and physical scars that she buried for decades, the survivor’s guilt that tormented her, the eternal regret of goodbye kisses that she didn’t get to give to her father, Léon, and 12-year-old brother, Gilbert, before Nazi guards sent to them to the gas chambers, and so many other cruelties.

After the 1993 release of “Schindler’s List,” Spielberg launched a foundation to collect testimonies from Holocaust survivors.

When it contacted Kolinka, she was reticent, replying that talking to her would be a waste of time, she recounts in “Return to Birkenau,” her memoir.

But when its interviewer then sat down with her, in 1997, out the memories flowed, for nearly three hours. Tears, too. The foundation says it has since collected more than 60,000 testimonies and is still gathering more.

“For the first time, I found myself compelled to think about it again,” Kolinka says in her book, published in 2019.

In World War II, Nazi-occupied France deported 76,000 Jewish men, women and children, mostly to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Just 2,500 survived. It took France’s leadership 50 years to officially acknowledge the state’s involvement in the Holocaust, when then-President Jacques Chirac in 1995 described French complicity as an indelible stain on the nation.

Through her books, media appearances and school visits, Kolinka has become the most prominent remaining French survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Just a few dozen, perhaps fewer than 30, are still alive, according to the Paris-based Union of Auschwitz Deportees, a survivors’ group.

Held back from the gas chambers

Pupils hung on her every word when Kolinka dropped by the Marcelin Berthelot high school east of Paris recently to tell her story for the umpteenth time, with The Associated Press also present. Even the abbreviated version, squeezed into roughly 90 minutes, makes for tough listening — from her arrest in March 1944 to her return to France, skeletal and traumatized, after Nazi Germany’s surrender in May 1945.

She described how she and other Jews were crammed aboard windowless animal-transport wagons in Paris and the violence and cruelty, with Nazi guards screaming orders and dogs barking, that greeted them at the other end three days later at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In her memoir, Kolinka says that the first German word she learned was “Schnell!” — meaning “Move it!”

The pupils listened in pin-drop silence as Kolinka explained that they were forced to strip naked and how that had been torture for the demure 19-year-old she was at the time.

“The Nazis’ hatred of Jews was such that they hunted for every detail that could make us suffer, humiliate us,” she said.

Then, Kolinka rolled up her left sleeve so pupils could see the identification number — 78599 — that a camp orderly tattooed on her forearm.

“Some people’s numbers cover their entire arm,” she said. “But I have a nice little number.”

Rock-star treatment

With time short and perhaps to spare their young imaginations, Kolinka didn’t tell the teenagers that most of the 1,499 men, women and children transported with her to Auschwitz-Birkenau in convoy No. 71 from Paris were killed on arrival.

Kolinka was among a couple of hundred who were kept back from the gas chambers and crematoriums to be used instead as forced labor.

As a prisoner, Kolinka used to watch subsequent trains being unloaded, knowing that those aboard would soon be dead.

Focused on survival, she shut down her emotions.

“I became a robot,” she told the pupils.

After her talk, a group of them gathered around Kolinka to keep chatting and ask more questions, giving her rock-star treatment, not wanting the encounter to end.

Nour Benguella, 17, and Saratou Soumahoro, 19, were giddy with admiration. Simultaneously, they reached for the same word to describe Kolinka: “Extraordinary.”

“An amazing woman. It’s wonderful to have her here in front of us. This strength of testimony, her mental fortitude,” Benguella said.

“Keeping this history alive is the only thing that will permit us to not make the same mistakes.”