The Only Child: How Renée Marcos Saved Her Family and Survived Auschwitz

On Jan 25, 2026, the City of Marseille held a ceremony to mark the 83rd anniversary of the January 1943 roundups. During the event, the Mayor of Marseille presented the Médaille de la Ville to Renée Guelidi Marcos.

Now 100 years old, Marcos is one of the city’s last living survivors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.

The ceremony took place at the site of the 1943 “rafles,” a Nazi-led operation assisted by French police that resulted in the forced eviction of 20,000 residents and the destruction of the Saint-Jean district.

While Renée was not taken in that specific raid, her deportation followed the 1944 escalation of arrests in the region.

The 1944 Arrest

Renée was born in Marseille to Isaac and Sol, Sephardic Jewish immigrants from Greece and Turkey. In May 1944, at the age of 18, she was arrested at her family home following a denunciation by neighbors.

She was taken to the Gestapo headquarters located on Rue Paradis for interrogation.

During the questioning, Renée claimed to be an only child. This statement successfully prevented the arrest of her four younger siblings – Marius, Vitalis, Denise, and Reine -who remained hidden for the duration of the occupation.

Following her interrogation, she was held at the Baumettes prison before being transferred to the Drancy internment camp near Paris.

Deportation

On May 20, 1944, Renée was deported on Convoi 74, a transport of 1,200 people that included 110 children. Upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, she was subjected to forced labor.

As the Red Army approached in January 1945, she was forced onto a “Death March.” She managed to escape the column and reached the Theresienstadt camp in what is now the Czech Republic.

When American forces liberated the camp in May 1945, Renée was suffering from typhus and weighed 35 kg. She eventually returned to Marseille, where she found that her parents and all four of her siblings had survived.

In the decades following the war, she became a regular speaker at the Grande Synagogue Breteuil and worked with the CRIF Marseille-Provence to document the history of the Shoah in Southern France.

The Marseille Roundups

The 1943 events commemorated yesterday involved the systematic destruction of the Old Port’s northern docks. Between January 22 and 24 1943, German authorities, supported by 12,000 French police officers, cordoned off the city.

They dynamited 1,500 buildings, covering an area of 14 hectares. The operation led to the deportation of 782 Jewish residents to the Sobibor extermination camp and 1,200 others to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

The ceremony served to link these historical facts with the personal testimony of survivors like Renée, whose family history in the city dates back to 1915.

The commemoration also included the traditional laying of wreaths at the memorial of the Deportations in the Panier district.

The city plans to continue expanding its archival project by digitizing the testimonies of the remaining witnesses from the 1943 and 1944 raids.

Renée Guelidi Marcos remains a central figure in this project, having provided documented oral histories to the Shoah Memorial and local educational institutions to maintain the record of the 6,000 total victims of the Marseille roundups.