He is now 88 years old but his memories are intact. Out of “loyalty” to those who protected her, she decided to return for the first time to the school that welcomed her in Villeurbanne in 1942. A return full of great emotion.
She was 8 years old in 1942. A Jewish girl with a yellow star. Operation “Spring Wind” was launched on 16 and 17 July. Agnès Buisson is with her father and her mother during this massive arrest of Jews in Paris (more than 13,000 people, including a third of children), the largest in France during World War II. With her mother they will flee and manage to reach the region of Lyon where her older brother, then twenty, resists. Dad won’t come back from the extermination camps.
Upon her arrival in the Lyon region, she will be assisted for three months in the boarding school for girls of the Catholic Institute of the Immaculate Conception in Villeurbanne.
Very quickly, in order not to differentiate her from the other students, a priest will give her communion. “It saved my life” she says.
My mother used to tell me: “remember, you are Jewish”, but she didn’t tell me not to pray. I prayed every night, I was sure that your God, our God would bring my father back to me
Agnès Buisson, survivor of the “Vel d’Hiv” raid.
After these few months spent in Villeurbanne, she will go to Isère, in Méaudre, where she will be hidden again in another school which now bears her name.
For the first time since 1942 he therefore crossed the institute’s portal on Tuesday 25 October 2022. A visit in complete privacy due to the school holidays.
I wanted to retrace my steps because there was a lightness in being here. It was an emergency, I will disappear and I wanted to remain faithful to those who protected me.
Agnès Buisson, survivor of the “Vel d’Hiv” raid.
After successfully completing her medical studies and starting a family (she will have three children), she now devotes herself to witnessing.
For the sake of memory, duty and history, Agnès Buisson, who now lives in Grenoble, will return in a few months to meet the students of the school to tell them about her life, in a context where anti-Semitism is always present, she said. .
