Adelaide Hautval, a Christian psychiatrist “just among the nations”

Marthe Adélaïde Haas Hautval was neither Jewish nor resistant. But by defending human dignity against the Nazis, she was deported in 1943 to Auschwitz then to Ravensbrück.

According to Sabine Faivre, author of her biography, Adelaide Hautval, a consciousness in the face of evil. The fate of a Christian doctor in the hell of Auschwitzshe is “a Christian whose faith is pegged to the body.”

Raised in faith and respect for other religions

Adelaide, known as “Haïdi” was born in 1906 in the Bas-Rhin, which was then part of Alsace annexed by Germany. She is the last of seven children. His father is a very important figure for her: Pasteur Huguenot, he transmits to his children, “an unconditional love for France”, “an instinctive compassion for the Jewish people”, and “the impregnation of evangelical values.”

In 1972, Adélaide said: “This veneration towards the Jews never left me. I cannot forget that they have suffered more than any other people in history … “

The convoy of 31,000

In the words of Sabine Faivre, Adélaïde is “patriot in the soul as his father.” At the start of the war, the psychiatrist was incarcerated for illegal crossing of the demarcation line. In her cell, she meets a Jewish woman whom she defends. Sabine Faivre relates his courageous declaration in her book: “The Jews are people like any other! ». The Germans ask her to withdraw her remarks if she wants to get out of prison, which she refuses.

The Gestapo then declared it “friend of the Jews” and the intern in the “Jews camps” of Pithivier then Beaune-la-Rolande (in the Loiret), before deporting it to Auschwitz-Birkenau and then in Ravensbrück. Adelaide was deported on January 24, 1943, in the convoy of 31,000, alongside Charlotte Delbo, Danièle Casanova and Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier. It is the only non -Jewish convoy deported from France to Auschwitz as part of the “night and fog” operation. Upon his arrival at the camp, Adélaide is tattooed with the number 31802.

She stands up to Nazi doctors

In the death camps, she constantly defends the dignity and the inviolability of human dignity. In Auschwitz, she refuses, for example, to participate in pseudo-drug experiments, especially those of Josef Mengele. Faced with the unspeakable, she consoles the little ones, tries to relieve the deportees mutilated by Nazi doctors and save patients in the gas chamber.

During her thirty-seven months of imprisonment and deportation, she saw her faith as an engine against Nazi barbarism. She always passes the most fragile before herself and rejoiced, even imprisoned, to attend a Christmas mass celebrated by a Catholic priest.

Adélaïde was recognized in 1965 “just among the nations” by Yad Vashem, the official Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. In France, she had to wait eighteen years, to receive her deported resistant card in December 1963. A social worker from the Red Cross who rubbed shoulders with her commitment: “She did not feel interned , but on a mission. “