Szyja Opatowski, nicknamed Samy, was 17 when the German troops invaded Poland in September 1939. For this young Jew, a long fight for survival began, a struggle at every moment to escape extermination. From April 1940, Samy was deported to Belzec, then a labour camp at the frontier of the Soviet Union. There, his analytical skills, his resourcefulness and extraordinary instinct enabled him to get out, without compromise.

Henri, born in Demblin in 1933, witnessed the Nazi invasion, the persecutions, the first deportation of the Jews of his town which included his sister and brother, the Warsaw Ghetto, then the disappearance of his father and the second deportation which he narrowly escaped. But he did not escape the Demblin labour camp, that of Czestochowa to which he was deported with his grandfather, and the concentration camp at Buchenwald.

Colette Tcherkawsky is one of 77 children of French Jewish prisoners of war who were deported from France to be used by the Nazis as bargaining-counters. If her father was protected by the Geneva conventions, the rest of the family were not spared the anti-Semitic persecutions and Nazi barbarity.

For over 25 years, Sarah Lichtsztejn-Montard has tirelessly recounted what she endured during the Second World War. How she and her mother escaped from the Vél’ d’Hiv’ after the round-up on July 16^th, 1942, and how they were reported in May 1944, thrusting them into the maelstrom of Nazi torment.

Nicolas Roth was one of the 440,000 Jews who were deported in 1944 from Hungary in just two months. He gives us here a richly detailed account of the fate of the Jewish community of Debrecen. After the German invasion in 1944, the Jews were confined to ghettos and then transported en masse to the death-camps. Deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Nicolas Roth managed to survive despite the harsh work to which he was subjected.

In more senses than one, Elisabeth Kasza was indeed a nomad. During the war she was deported and sent from one concentration camp to another. She then had to go into exile to flee the Communist dictatorship. After becoming an actress, she travelled within herself, from character to character.

Fleeing the Parisian region during the exodus, the Goltman family found refuge in the Allier department of central France. There Pierre and his father were denounced and arrested as accomplices of the local Resistance. It was as Jews that they were transferred to the camp of Drancy, then deported in the convoy of June 30, 1944.

Charles Mitzer was a young soldier at the time of the French defeat in 1940. Returning to civilian life, he worked in Grenoble as a radio-electrician and put his skills at the disposition of the Resistance. After the German invasion of the Occupation zone administered by the Italians, he was arrested in February 1944 when he was on his way to join the underground and bring his woman companion to safety. Charles and his young brother were deported in Convoy N°69.

In September 1940, Eva Golgevit joined the Solidarity group, Jewish section of the Communist resistance movement MOI (Main-d’Oeuvre Immigrée). She was arrested, imprisoned and deported, like the majority of her network, in Convoy N°58, July 31, 1943. On arrival at Auschwitz, she was interned in Block 10, reserved for "medical experiments".

If the death camp of Treblinka is now sadly famous, the labour camp which preceded it (Treblinka I) is much less known. Mieczyslaw Chodzko’s story is one of the rare eyewitness accounts about that camp. Mieczyslaw Chodzko was born in Lodz in 1930. Rounded up in the Falenica ghetto, he was deported to Treblinka and transferred on arrival to the labour camp.