Ginette Kolinka

Ginette Kolinka 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.