Fortunée Chouraki Messouda Benguigui

Who was Fortunée Chouraki Messouda Benguigui?

Fortunée Chouraki Messouda Benguigui was born in 1904 in Oran, Algeria. She was arrested in Marseilles in 1943, believing her three sons to be safe at Izieu; her baby daughter Yvette was entrusted to local farmers and survived the raid. She lost her sons—Jacques (12), Richard (7), and Jean-Claude (6)—in the raid, which took place while she was a prisoner in Auschwitz. Having survived brutal medical experiments, she was assigned to a sorting shed where she learned of her children’s deaths by finding her son’s hand-knit sweater on the shoulders of a camp doctor’s teenage boy.

Although Fortunée had been declared seventy-five percent incapacitated at the end of the war, she agreed to go to Munich in September 1971, to join Beate Klarsfeld in protesting against the German government’s dismissal of criminal proceedings against the former Lyons Gestapo head. The two women sat on the steps of the Palace of Justice with Mme Benguigui holding a sign in one hand: “I will continue my hunger strike until the Munich prosecutor’s office reopens proceedings against Klaus Barbie, the murderer of my three children.” In the other hand she held a photo of her three little boys.

The women’s success resulted in both a renewed effort to prosecute the war criminal and an important lead as to his whereabouts in La Paz, Bolivia. At Barbie’s trial some sixteen years later, Fortunée would state that she testified “to honor the memory of my three sons; ... I survived [the medical] tests because I was sure my children were safe. ... [When I saw the sweater in Auschwitz] I realized something had happened and started crying.” Benguigui died less than two years later, in December 1988, on the day that she was awarded the Legion of Honor medal.