Charles Gottlieb was named an Honorary Citizen of the City of Nice during a ceremony attended by authorities and many members of the Jewish community.
A resistance fighter, deportee, and Jew, Charles Gottlieb is one of the last surviving witnesses of the extermination camps. Despite his age—he will be 90 in 2015—this adopted Niçois is still a tireless witness to these dark pages of humanity during the “memory trips” to Auschwitz-Birkenau organized annually by the General Council for the secondary school students of the department.
The son of Polish immigrants, he was 16 years old when he joined the resistance. Arrested on July 25, 1944, by the French militia, he was tortured in Klaus Barbie’s offices in Lyon and then deported to Auschwitz.
Having endured the worst suffering, he now acts as a witness to the youth, especially in the schools and high schools of Nice. He has become a major link in the transmission of this memory and has made Nice an exemplary city of remembrance. Last May 5, Charles Gottlieb received the insignia of Knight in the Order of Academic Palms.
Christian Estrosi, who officiated the award ceremony and had requested that Charles Gottlieb symbolically wear the mayor’s sash upon his election last March, wanted to recall in his speech: “Your life is that of a French citizen like others, and yet you measure more than so many others all that is struggle in this simple word,” ending on an emotional note: “What brings us together today around you is not only admiration and respect, which sculpture the hearts.”
With extraordinary lucidity for his age and life’s trials, the recipient astonished the audience in his words of thanks with his modesty: “It is I who thank you for this honor. When I accompany young people to Auschwitz, my painful memories fade to give way to the hope that they will never know this.”
And demonstrating a beautiful irony, this sentiment that, as the scholar said, “is none other than the declaration of human superiority over what happens to them,” he recalled an anecdote: “When I arrived at the concentration camp, a friend told me: Here we arrive on our legs and leave as smoke.”
He, Charles Gottlieb, is still there, strong as a rock, with indestructible moral fiber, the serenity of those who know how to see broadly and far.
