My father was a working man, a roofer, a plumber, someone who lived by his hands. He was forty years old when the SS arrested him in Figeac. My uncle was taken with him. They were deported. My father died in Bergen-Belsen. My uncle never came back. Their absence became the foundation of our lives.

After the war, my mother was left alone with four children. I was the youngest. My eldest sister was fifteen when everything changed. My aunt, my mother’s own sisterlost her husband too and was left with three children. Two widows. Seven children. No money. No help. Liberation did not end the suffering. It simply changed how we experienced hardship.

As a child, no one explained anything. Survivors did not speak. They were afraid of not being believed, of reopening something too terrible to name. So silence settled over families like a second occupation.

My father somehow wrote letters from Bergen-Belsen to my mother. Letters from inside a camp. She never told me. Not when I was young. Not even when I was grown. Only a few years before she died did she finally say, “I have letters from your father.” By then, the silence had lasted a lifetime.

That silence was not only ours. France wanted to rebuild, to look forward, to reconcile. So we commemorated instead. Every year, the town stopped. We marched. We laid wreaths. We remembered, but we did not understand. Only decades later did the truth emerge. Slowly. Painfully. For a long time, silence was survival. Now, maintaining the memories is our responsibility. I speak so that absence is no longer all that remains.