Popeck confides in the tragic fate of his mother, “I could have died if I had stayed with her”

The son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Popeck was a hidden child during the war. Having grown up with his father, the comedian has few memories of his mother, who died when he was four years old. In an interview given to France Sundayhe said:I think I’ve always had a little star above my head. At 3-4 years old, I could have died if I had stayed with my mother. Fortunately, when my parents got angry and my father left, he took me with him. He saved my life, because soon after, my mother was arrested, deported and murdered.“As her father died in December 1963, Popeck added:”I never dared ask my father about our history. It will remain my great regret.“

Two years earlier, it is already in the columns of France Sunday that the star had evoked his childhood. Confiding in his parents who were deported, Popeck explained: “My dad got away with it, I never knew how. My sister, who was also arrested and deported, used to say: ‘To speak is to walk on the dead.’ To tell you the truth, I’ve been on stage for fifty years and it’s only very recently that I dared to do a sketch on my real first name, Judka, which I hated because at school, they called ‘coffee juice, poop juice’…“Evoking the death of his mother, he had revealed:”I have no memory of her. I didn’t know until much later that my mother’s name was engraved on what I call the ‘Racial Hatred Memorial.’ All the Eastern European Jews who escaped deportation only found out long after the war what had become of their relatives. On my mother’s papers it says: ‘Disappeared. Died at Drancy.’ That’s all I have left of her. My dad never told me about it. They were separated, and maybe that’s what saved me…“

Popeck: “Dad was everything to me”

Well aware that he owed everything to his father, the comedian said: “My father had been in Paris since 1910, he was a veteran of the First World War from Romania and he had many connections. He did everything to hide me during the war. He entrusted me to the Children’s Relief Work (OSE) which placed me in a home for secular Jewish children at the Château de Chaumont, in Creuse. Dad was everything to me, he was both my father and my mother! He left at the age of 83 when I was 26. It was he who inspired my character Popeck.” In December 2018, it’s for Actu.fr which he had revealed when referring to the death of his mother: “She was arrested in a restaurant and taken to the police station in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. She took the 3rd convoy of women to Auschwitz.“

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