When Marion Deichmann was 9, two French police officers in plain clothes arrested her mother in their Parisian apartment as part of the Vel d’Hiv roundups, mass arrests of Jews in Paris, in 1942.
“I wanted to go with her, but they said, ‘You’re not on the list,’” Deichmann said. She moved into hiding in Normandy, where she hid until the Allied powers liberated France in 1944.
Deichmann later learned her mother was taken to Drancy internment camp before eventually dying in the gas chambers of Auschwitz concentration camp. Her mother wrote her two letters from Drancy, which Deichmann found after the war.
“My whole life’s wish was to tell the world of the absolute evil of the Nazis, of the gas chambers,” she said.
Deichmann describes her experience in the Holocaust and her relationship with her mother in her book “Her Name Shall Remain Unforgotten,” which was published in 2017. The Chicago resident signed copies of her book Friday at the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center in Skokie. The visit fell the day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“We are fortunate in Skokie that we have a community of Holocaust survivors who live here who have made Chicagoland their home,” Museum CEO Bernard Cherkasov said. “Marion is one of our very actively engaged survivors who is telling her story and her mother’s story of survival, of loss, of resistance, and ultimately of finding resilience and hope.”
Deichmann was born in Germany in 1932, about six weeks before Adolf Hitler came into power.
Deichmann and her family fled the Nazi regime soon after, moving first to Luxembourg, then to Paris, where her mother was arrested on July 16, 1942.
After the war, Deichmann returned to Paris to reunite with her grandmother and uncle. The family immigrated to New York in 1947. Deichmann moved to California in 1957, where she completed her degree at University of California, Riverside.
She and her husband returned to France in 1970, where she worked at the World Health Organization for over two decades. She returned to the United States three years ago to be closer to her children, this time settling in Chicago.
The museum is also showing this month a virtual reality short film of Deichmann’s story, “Letters from Drancy.” The film follows Deichmann from her birth in Germany through her escape to Luxembourg, then Paris during the Holocaust, and her quest to find her mother after liberation. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2023.
“My mother lives in me. She’s present in me. I think she would be happy with me — most of the things I’ve done, not all,” she said in the short film.
“We can never know what it was truly like to live through the Holocaust,” Cherkasov said. “But it’s so important to us to hear the stories and testimonies directly from those who did. Virtual reality films allow us not only to hear the history directly from the survivors but also to be visually present with them.”
The book signing attracted visitors from far and wide. Belen Nuzzo drove an hour and a half from Valparaiso, Indiana, to meet Deichmann.
“To get a real, in-person experience is important to me,” Nuzzo said. “It’s an important topic to learn.”
Nuzzo said she used to have more opportunities to meet Holocaust survivors when she lived in California, so she felt she had to drive to Skokie to meet Deichmann when she learned she’d be signing books. Nuzzo said meeting survivors is important in ensuring the Holocaust doesn’t happen again.
Deichmann hoped readers would finish her book understanding more about the importance of tolerance and anti-prejudice.
“The color of your skin, the color of your eyes, we’re all homo sapiens. You have to remember that,” Deichmann said.
Deichmann is now in her 90s but doesn’t show signs of wanting to slow down. She said she hopes to continue sharing her story and keeping her mother’s memory alive “as long as my brain still works.”
