Maurice Halbwachs – “... deported at the last moment.”

The American troops were just outside Paris when, in August 1944, the occupiers had prisoners from the city jails sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp on the very last transport. The renowned sociologist Maurice Halbwachs was one of the deportees. He was a member of the Socialist Party and married to a Jew. Both of their sons were active in the resistance. He had been arrested a month earlier. He and his son were put in the Little Camp in Buchenwald. There the sixty-seven-year-old professor contracted dysentery; months later, before his son’s eyes, he died a wretched death from the consequences of this disease. His works on memory theory are still considered classics today.