Roger Friedman was born in Lille on 23 June 1925. He was an apprentice printer when war broke out in France. He testified that he was arrested in October or November 1943 at his workplace, the Martin Mary printing works on Rue de Paris in Lille. There is some doubt as to the exact date of his arrest. He stated that he was sent to Alderney on 6 December 1943, but no convoy is recorded for that date, so he may have travelled in a small boat with few others or perhaps he may have been part of the convoy of 11 October 1943, which included young French Jews like himself. He was assigned the registration number 623 in Alderney, which corresponds to the numbers of the members of the 11 October convoy. He was in Camp No. 2, in Norderney and assigned to work on the Atlantic Wall. On 7 May 1944, the group of Jews in Norderney (there were about 440 of them at the time) was evacuated from the island via Cherbourg before being taken by train to camps in northern France around Boulogne-sur-Mer. With the Allied advance, the prisoners were transferred to Germany, but the convoy was stopped on 4 September 1944, when the deportees, including Roger Friedman, regained their freedom. He emigrated to Israel in March 1946. Unlike many former Jewish deportees from France, he did not keep in touch with the former deportees who formed an association after the war. For this reason, he was not included in the first censuses and was not recognised as a deportee until 1998.

He gave his testimony on 8 October 2020, via a live link from Tel Aviv, during the screening of Charlie Gauvain’s documentary Aurigny, les années de guerres (Alderney, the war years) at the Palace cinema in Cherbourg.

Sources

Division des archives des victimes des conflits contemporain (DAVCC), Service historique de la Défense, Caen, dossier individuel 21P609377