As soon as she enters a room, her smile lights up the space.
“I’m always positive,” Lili Keller-Rosenberg says with a glint in her eye. She wears lipstick, has an impeccable blow-dry and wears a carefully chosen dress, because she insists on being elegant in all circumstances. "A lesson in dignity," as she puts it.
That philosophy has stayed with her from her experience in the concentration camps. "Every morning at Ravensbrück, my mother would wake us half an hour before the others, because she was absolutely determined that we wash ourselves. She would tell us: 'They've taken everything from us. We have nothing left, not even a name, but we must not bow our heads. Let's be dignified. Let's look proper,'" she remembers, 80 years later, at the hotel in Lille where we have arranged to meet.
Lili Keller-Rosenberg was born on September 15, 1932, in more hopeful times. "In a warm home with wonderful parents," she says. "They came from Budapest, Hungary, where there was already anti-Semitism. They chose to settle in France because it's the country of human rights. That's where we were born – in the north of France, my two brothers and I," she says.
But she later had her childhood stolen.
In the few family photos that survived World War II, there are smiling faces. Her mother, Charlotte, was a seamstress. Her father, Joseph, was employed in a dyeworks. It was a state of simple happiness in the small house in Roubaix. But the conflict gradually intruded into daily life. At 10 years old, in June 1942, Lili was forced to wear the yellow star of David.
"It didn't shock me. I thought it was pretty. I wore it without asking too many questions," she remembers.
The parents tried to protect their three children and never spoke of the war until the day when the threat became impossible to ignore. They decided to hide the children in different families in Tourcoing, helped by the priest of a parish in Roubaix.
"It was a wonderful gesture,” she says. “They risked being deported themselves. It was very courageous.”
'The Nazis were yelling, the dogs were barking, the children were crying'
But at the end of summer 1943, without her knowing the reason, her parents decided to bring them back home. “Perhaps they imagined that there was no longer any risk." Sadly, a few months later, on October 27, at 3 o'clock in the morning, violent knocks struck at the door. The Feldgendarmerie (German military police) burst into the Rosenberg home.
The moment is engraved in Lili's memory. "They followed us everywhere, even to the toilet. We couldn't be alone. They shouted, 'Schnell, los!' (Move, quickly!). We had to gather what was most precious. We were frantic with fear." Her youngest brother, André, was only 3 years old: "I remember he took his favourite toy, a wooden duck on wheels. He put it under his arm and followed those soldiers who pushed us down the stairs," she remembers.
The family was first taken to Loos prison in Lille. The city was under the military administration of Belgium and Northern France, an entity created by Nazi Germany. The Rosenbergs were then transferred to Saint-Gilles prison in Brussels, then to the Malines internment camp in Belgium.
Read more'We'll make it home together': A friendship between two deported women in Ravensbrück camp
"In this camp there were German SS, but also Flemish ones. One of them was particularly cruel and distributed lashes of the whip generously," Keller-Rosenberg says.
The conditions were dreadful, but the worst was yet to come. On December 13, 1943, the SS informed them that they would have to leave the camp. A search was organised first, which Lili still remembers with disgust: "We all had to get naked. We were very uncomfortable. You know, back then, we were very modest. We had to spread our legs, and bend forward. They shone a flashlight at us from below to see if we had hidden precious objects. Jewellery, for example."
Cattle cars then awaited the deportees. It was chaos: "The Nazis were yelling, the dogs were barking, the children were crying. We were pushed into a wagon and it was only once the doors were closed that we realised papa wasn't with us." Joseph was transferred to the Buchenwald camp, while the rest of the family were sent to Ravensbrück.
'Our humanity was stripped away'
After an "atrocious journey of four or five days without eating or drinking", Lili, her mother and her two brothers arrived at the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany, the largest for women under the Third Reich. They were pushed into prison blocks. "We had a quick, cold shower. We were all shaved. Our humanity was stripped away. We were given our prisoner clothing, those grey-and-blue-striped dresses, and our prisoner numbers. Mine was 25,612." In her small voice, she repeats it in German. Five numbers forever imprinted in her mind: "From that moment on, we were nobody."
At Ravensbrück, 80 km north of Berlin, the Rosenbergs met other French women, mostly resistance fighters – including Geneviève de Gaulle, General Charles de Gaulle's niece, and Martha Desrumaux, a union activist from northern France. There were very few children because those who were there for political reasons were arrested alone, without their families. In this hell, Lili became aware of the fate that was reserved for them:
"I understood that we had been arrested because we were Jewish and that the Nazis wanted to destroy all the Jews of Europe."
All day long, she found herself left to her own devices with her little brothers, while their mother was sent into forced labour. "We didn't dare leave our blocks. We stayed inside for fear of seeing the Nazis and their dogs. They had no feelings. We saw the inhuman way they behaved with all the prisoners."
No more games, no more laughter, no more moments of carefree innocence. "Our entertainment consisted of killing lice. We were covered in vermin. The more we killed, the more appeared." Covered in boils, they also suffered from hunger. They survived on hard bread and a disgusting black liquid. Lili says they survived thanks to their mother's love. "Without her, we were lost. It was her presence that gave us the will to live. We waited for her to return every evening, and then we could breathe again."
The 'horror in those soldiers’ eyes' when they discovered Bergen-Belsen
In February 1945, exhausted, the family was told it was time to leave Ravensbrück. As the Soviets advanced, the prisoners were gradually evacuated. The Rosenbergs were again pushed into train wagons. After a chaotic journey, the doors opened and an atrocious smell grabbed them by the throat: "I couldn't even describe it to you. We arrived in a place that felt even more sinister than Ravensbrück,” remembers Lili. “There were corpses all over the ground. We had to step over them to move forward."
The living, dead and sick were all mixed together. With horror, Lili discovered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, known as the "camp of slow death". It was in the midst of a typhus epidemic. "I can still see those wooden carts fitted with four posts and with a grey canvas curtain. With the wind, it would lift up. You could see an arm hanging here, a leg there, a skull there. It was a Dantesque vision."
Read moreThe liberation of Auschwitz, 80 years on: Ginette Kolinka, using humour to survive horror
In this apocalyptic setting, the family gradually lost strength. Charlotte contracted typhus and her children could not help her. "She lay on the ground next to us. When we spoke to her, she didn't answer us. She was so strange, she seemed to be in another world. We understood nothing. She had been so formidable at Ravensbrück, she couldn't imagine returning without one of us and so she deprived herself of her meager rations to give us an extra mouthful. There, she lay on the ground, unconscious, in a terrible state," Lili remembers with vivid emotion. "We wanted to die at that moment. Death would have been preferable to this beastly life they made us lead. We let ourselves go, nothing mattered to us anymore."
But the little Rosenbergs held on despite everything. On April 15, 1945, they witnessed the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen camp by British soldiers. "I can still see the horror in those soldiers' eyes. They didn't dare move. They took a few steps back, not daring to approach us. They were horrified.” Lili remembers the cans of corned beef and packets of sweet, condensed milk the soldiers distributed, once they had got over the initial shock. In the "camp of slow death", 60,000 survivors coexisted with thousands of corpses.
Lili and her brothers were finally repatriated to France, but their mother, too ill to be transported, remained in Germany. They arrived alone at the Hôtel Lutetia in Paris, a reception centre for freed prisoners. "No one came to collect us. We had no one. We were happy to be free and back in France, but at the same time we were so sad. We had no news of our parents. What was the point of living if we were to be orphans?"
After being taken in by an aunt, the children were sent to a sanatorium in Hendaye in the Basque Country to receive medical care. Against all odds, their mother found them there. "One day, the door to our room opened. Maman was there before our eyes, frighteningly thin. Life took on meaning for us again." The family was only partially reunited. A few months later, they learned that their father had been shot by the Nazis three days before the liberation of Buchenwald.
The number of survivors is dwindling
Their health was fragile and they had very little money, but the Rosenbergs had to resume the course of their lives. They returned to settle in the north of France. "Those were hard years," Lili remembers. The decades passed and silence fell on their experience in the camps.
"People seemed to doubt what we told them. It offended us greatly. We kept silent."
Lili became a secretary and never left the north. She continues to live in Lille today. She married and had a daughter.
It was only in the 1980s that she decided to speak out, she says, when “Holocaust deniers emerged – those who dared to say that it hadn’t existed.”
Lili began sharing her story in middle schools and high schools, "to her little messengers of peace", as she likes to call them.
Meeting young people energises her. "They listen, my little messengers. It gives me the desire to continue. They're sweet and ask me good questions."
She has lost count of how many schools she has visited over the course of more than 40 years. She has spoken to hundreds of thousands of students. "Sometimes, I speak to 2,000 schoolchildren all at once,” she says.
At 93, she admits "that she would like to take a little break" because it's "not so easy to keep going back to the past". Yet projects keep coming her way. After publishing her first book in 2021, "And We Came Back Alone," a comic book will soon be dedicated to her: "Lili, Always Standing, Until the End".
Regional authorities have acquired her former house in Roubaix, with plans to make it a memorial centre honouring deported children like herself.
Lili shows no signs of stopping. Her schedule for 2026 is already full with "requests from all over France and even abroad".
Survivors of the Holocaust are increasingly rare and she is one of the last in France who can still travel.
'One day peace will come'
Tirelessly, Lili shares her family’s story. Her younger brothers are still alive and she says she's prepared to continue bearing witness until she’s at least 100 years old. "After that, we'll see!" she says, smiling.
Mixing gentleness and strength, she describes the worst of humanity on a mission to spread peace.
"I tell the children to be vigilant because everything can come back in a different form. Evil is everywhere. We must fight racism at all costs, which is a scourge of our time – anti-Semitism, which unfortunately persists, as well as xenophobia."
Lili has known evil up close. But despite that, she believes in humanity. "We can't live entire lives in war. One day peace will come. And I'll see it from up above, and I’ll rejoice."
This article has been translated from the original in French.
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