Their work has paid. Students in the minor district of the Liancourt penitentiary center were put in the spotlight, during the award of the Annie and Charles Corrin award to Paris on January 30. The organizers awarded this award with two classes from Agen (Lot-et-Garonne) and Saint-Quentin (Aisne). Those of Liancourt have been the subject of a special mention of the jury.
The students followed by Jérôme Bouchain, referent of national education in the prison, produced an educational suitcase containing an interactive exhibition. Entitled “The Malmed family, a martyred compiégnoise French family”, the presentation relates to the story of a family victim of Nazi barbarism.
Children saved by righteous
Everything starts from the reading of passages from Léon Malmed’s book “We have survived, finally I speak”. The work tells of his childhood. First happy then the descent into hell, tracks it down, the fear of denunciation, then the tragic disappearance of part of his family due to the deportations in the death camps by the Nazis. The students then worked on original documents from the Oise departmental archives.
They thus retraced the journey of this family from Poland. They fled anti-Semitic persecution there. To then settle in France by trying to improve their fate. Father Surl Malmed also voluntarily integrated the French army. During the occupation, they undergo the arryanization of their trade in the sale of itinerant clothes. They meet a couple of just Suzanne and Henri Ribouleau. They will save the lives of their children Léon and Rachel, at the risk of their lives.
Duty of memory
The suitcase served as an educational tool for several schools in Liancourt and its surroundings.
Created in 1989 by two survivors of the death camps, the Annie and Charles Corrin Prize rewards a didactic and educational work on the Holocaust. This must be, carried out in schools by students and their teachers and sponsored by the Ministry of National Education. The challenge: to transmit to young people the memory of this atrocity.
