Portrait of Maurice Ben Zaquen.
Overview
- Caption
- Portrait of Maurice Ben Zaquen.
- Date
-
1930 - 1939
- Locale
- Paris, [Seine] France?
- Photo Credit
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Yoram Haimi
Rights & Restrictions
- Photo Source
-
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial MuseumProvenance: Yoram Haimi
Keywords & Subjects
- Photo Designation
-
LIFE BEFORE THE HOLOCAUST -- France -- Family/Friends/Portraits
Administrative Notes
- Biography
- Samuel Ben Zaquen was born around 1870 in Tangiers, Morocco to Jewish parents. He was a businessman, and in 1892 he received Brazilian citizenship. He married Freba Cohen (b. May 10, 1877 in Oran, Morocco), and they had two sons, Yahia ("Jacky" or "Yitzhak," b. 2/22/1904) and Maurice (b. 8/8/1908), both in Casablanca. In the late 1920s or early 1930s, the family moved to Paris, where they lived in the Jewish quarter, on rue de Rosiers. Samuel rented a studio for Maurice, who was a photographer, and Jacky worked in vintage stained glass.
Around the early 1930s, Samuel and Freba divorced and Samuel moved back to Morocco. He married Zohara Turgeman (b. 1912 in Marrakesh) and had two more children, Simcha (b. July 28, 1933) and a son named Berber who died of typhus as an infant. In his grief over his baby son’s death, Samuel visited his tomb for 28 days, and died of sorrow. Zohara remarried Shimon Waknine and had a son, Isaac ("Yitzhak," b. 1941).
At the start of WWII, Freba and her sons were still living in France, and they remained there in hiding under German occupation. Someone revealed the locations of Maurice and Jacky, and on January 9, 1943, they were arrested by the French police (or Gestapo) and sent to Drancy. Three days later, on the 12th, their mother Freba was arrested in Paris, and also sent to Drancy. On February 9, the three were transferred together to camp Beaune la Rolande. After three weeks, they were sent once again to Drancy. On March 25, they were deported from Drancy on convoy 53 toward Auschwitz. Firsthand accounts of the trip, as well as information in the Serge Klarsfeld book "Memorial de la Deportation des Juifs de France" (Memorial of the Deportation of Jews of France) indicate that the convoy stopped in Majdanek for a few hours, then continued on to Sobibor, rather than to Auschwitz. Freba, Maurice, and Jacky are presumed to have been killed in Sobibor.
After the war’s end, Zohara, Shimon, Simcha, and Isaac moved to Paris, where Shimon sold vegetables from a cart. In 1948, they immigrated to Israel. There, Simcha married Josef Haim in 1951, and they had three sons, Samuel, Mordechai, and Yoram. Yoram pursued studies in archeology at Hebrew University, and became a curator in the Department of Antiquities. In 2007, he joined Polish archeologist Wohiech Mazuek and a team of archeologists excavating the killing site at Sobibor. Their innovative subsurface mapping techniques led to the discovery of the location of the Himmelfahrstrass ("Road to Heaven"), where inmates were forced to walk to the gas chambers, as well as to the discovery of some 70,00 artifacts. Excavations are ongoing, and Yoram hopes that the knowledge they gain will serve to commemorate those who perished there.
- Record last modified:
- 2019-08-07 00:00:00
- This page:
- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1185367
