Henri Weber, former socialist senator from Seine-Maritime, died Sunday, April 26, of Covid-19 in Avignon, his family announced. He was 75 years old. This close friend of Laurent Fabius was one of the figures of Trotskyism in France before his conversion to social democracy in the 1980s. His life and his career followed the torments of the 20th century.
Henri Weber was born on June 24, 1944 in Leninabad, in the USSR (today Khodjent, in Tajikistan), in a Soviet labor camp, on a hospital ship moored on the banks of the Syr-Daria river. Her Polish Jewish family fled her town of Chrzanow, Galicia, a few miles from Auschwitz, during the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, choosing the USSR.
Refusing to become Soviet citizens, the Weber spouses were first sent to a labor camp in Siberia before being transferred, at their request, to Leninabad. There, the father is employed as a lumberjack and the mother as a seamstress. "It was not a strict regime detention center, much less an extermination camp but a real labor camp: once their day is over, the prisoners go about their business freely", explains Henri Weber, in his autobiography Rebel youth (ed. Robert Laffont, 2018).
After the war ended, the Weber family returned to Poland for a while, but still prevalent anti-Semitism convinced them to leave. In 1948, the Weber family moved to Paris, where the father resumed his watchmaking activity.
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