Ginette Kolinka (born Ginette Cherkasky) is a French Holocaust survivor. When her father and brother were taken away to be killed by poison gas, shortly after the train on which they had been transported arrived at Auschwitz, she was selected for factory work and taken to the women's camp. Released in May 1945, she remained silent about her war-time experiences for half a century. Her own explanation for this is that she did not wish to irritate people. Whatever the truth of that, after her husband died, and soon after the dawn of a new century, she became an energetic "ambassador for the memory" of those times, criss-crossing the country to share her holocaust knowledge with school children and students. Thanks to the ensuing media exposure, it is no longer only among children and students that, during the first decades of the twenty-first century, she has heightened awareness of the Shoah and its lessons.
Biography
Provenance and early years
Ginette Cherkasky was born in the family home at Paris into a non-religious Jewish family, the youngest of her parents' six daughters. After July 1931 there would also be one younger brother. The final decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth had witnessed massive population shifts from east to west across Europe, drawn by disparities in wage levels and, in the case of Jewish families, driven by pogroms and rumours of them. Her father, Léon, ran a little garments business, manufacturing rain coats. He had been born in Paris. Her paternal grandfather's family, the Cherkaskys, had arrived from Ukraine (at that time, from a mainstream French or English perspective, part of the Russian empire, even of the local realities were more varied and nuanced). Her mother, born Berthe Fairstin, had been born at Pitești in Romania. Ginette's earliest years were spent in central Paris, after which the family moved to Aubervilliers, just outside the city on its north side. In around 1935 they returned to central Paris, living in a family apartment within the commercial space occupied by her father's manufacturing workshop.
War
Ginette Cherkasky was 14 when the French government declared war on Germany during the fortnight between the German invasion of Poland from the west and the Russian invasion of Poland from the south and east. She was 15 by the time Germany over-ran France from (primarily) the north during the early summer of 1940. The Paris region was in the northern half of France which, together with the country's Atlantic coast, came under direct German military administration, while the southern half of the country was less directly controlled, through a puppet government. Thousands of Parisians fled south. At this stage Cherkasky's family remained in the Paris region, however. During 1941 her uncle and a brother-in-law were arrested, probably in connection with their Jewish provenance.
Escape to the south
It was almost certainly during July 1942 that, with her parents and younger brother, Ginette Cherkasky hastily set off towards the southern half of France, which at this stage could still be identified without excessive irony as the "free zone". The previous evening an official from the préfecture had turned up at the door. The official had come across a reference to the family in the préfecture files, and had come to warn them of something contained in them: "You are Jews and communists, you should leave Paris!" Léon Cherkasky simply nodded: it is not clear whether he had even recognised their unexpected visitor. Later that evening he made his way to the café at the nearby "Carreau du Temple" (covered market), a well-known meeting place where it was possible to find people willing and able to help refugees. He procured forged false identity papers, and before they left in the morning made sure that the children had all memorised their new names. Cherkasky insisted that the family should split into smaller groups of three or four, each of which travelled separately by different routes. There are hints that initially the children - at least the youngest of them, , accompanying their parents - thought they were embarking on some sort of "grand vacation": reality was very much grimmer. Armed with forged false identity documents they settled in Avignon.