Choose a protagonist, then move from stage to stage: the map locates each place, and the right-hand column reveals its story, illustrated by photographs and archives. The three journeys converge in Nice, where they are rebuilt.
The routes are schematic (lines linking known stages), not the actual deportation itineraries.
Drawing on hundreds of archival documents, this memorial reconstructs two parallel destinies that set out from Warsaw — that of Adolphe Sokolski and that of Tauba Izraelska — and that come together after the war to give birth to Claude.
In Warsaw, in the Mostowski district, live the Izraelski and the Sokolski families. Zelik Izraelski, a merchant, and Chana Kulik raise Tauba (born 1904) and her siblings. Nearby, Morzek Jankel Sokolski and Chaja Tauba Blajszt raise Abraham, born 17 January 1898, one of a large family scattered as far as Melbourne and Paris.
At eighteen, Abraham was interned as a civilian prisoner in Stettin (1916-1918). After returning to Warsaw and a Belgian stopover in Charleroi, he reached Lille in 1923, became Adolphe and joined the Couzineau company. Tauba arrived in Lille in 1926 — a visa for Brazil in hand, but she would stay.
The France of human rights nonetheless kept them at arm's length: residence refusals, expulsions. Tauba fought for ten years, supported by Deputy Jean Montigny; Adolphe applied for naturalisation for thirteen years. In 1936 Adolphe married Sosia Gruszka; Jacqueline, Arlette and Francine were born. On 2 September 1939 Adolphe volunteered for the French army.
Arrested a first time in 1941, Adolphe was rounded up with his whole family in Douai on 11 September 1942. At Auschwitz, Sosia and their three daughters were gassed on arrival; Adolphe survived (number 64095), passed through a labour detail in Warsaw, then Dachau and Mühldorf. Tauba and Bernard Kurower, arrested in Cahors in 1944, were deported to Auschwitz, where Bernard died. Tauba survived Bergen-Belsen, liberated on 15 April 1945.
Two survivors who had lost everything recognised one another and married. From their union Claude was born, in Lille, on 7 February 1954. “On the day I was born, my father took the photograph of his three daughters out of his wallet and replaced it with mine.” Adolphe died in 1967; Claude was declared a Ward of the Nation.
Claude grew up in the shadow of three little girls he never knew. A journalist, he became a keeper of memory: testimonies, schools, ceremonies in Douai, work with the historian Monique Heddebaut. In 2012 the Presidency of the Republic replied to him.
On 4 December 2024 the Republic recognised Thérèse “Died for France”, at the end of Claude's long campaign. It was he, then his son Sylvain, who brought the inquiry to completion. From Warsaw in 1898 to today, the line has not been broken.
More than 290 documents — civil records, naturalisation and expulsion files, camp records, deportee cards, correspondence and photographs — browsable and filterable by person and theme, for remembrance and study.
In memory of the family members murdered in the Shoah. May their memory be a blessing.
“She told me that on the day I was born, my father took the photograph of his three daughters out of his wallet and replaced it with mine.”
— Claude Sokolski
This memorial is the fruit of long and methodical archival research, carried out by Claude Sokolski with the historian Monique Heddebaut, and completed by Sylvain Sokolski.
Content based on the “Memorial of the Sokolski Family” (1898–2024). A work of remembrance still in progress.