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.

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".

KLB 58907 was the prisoner number to which the Nazis reduced Gabriel Lampel at the Buchenwald camp. Gabriel was one of 440,000 Jews who, in 1944, were deported from Hungary in just two months. Originally from Transylvania, Gabriel was subjected to the Hungarian oppression and anti-Semitic persecutions of the Horthy regime. After the invasion of Hungary by the Nazis, Gabriel was deported with his mother to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

At the time of the German invasion, Maurice Szmidt and his family fled from Belgium and took refuge in the Hérault department of southern France. With the help of refugee support organizations, Maurice attended the agriculture school at La Roche. He was arrested there during the police raid of the southern zone in August 1942. Interned in the Casseneuil camp (Lot-et-Garonne), he was transferred to Drancy prior to deportation in Convoy N°30.

Born into a Jewish family emigrated from Poland, Albert Bigielman was a little Paris scamp whose childhood was turned upside down by the war. After joining the Foreign Legion, his father was captured. Albert stayed with his mother and kid brother in Menilmontant. On February 4, 1944, he was rounded up with his mother and interned in the camp at Drancy for three months. Both of them were deported with the status of hostages to the camp at Bergen-Belsen.

Denise Holstein was arrested with her parents during the great police roundup of the Jews of Rouen in early 1943. Committed to hospital, she could not be returned to the camp at Drancy where she had been interned. At 16, she became a monitor at the Louveciennes centre for children whose parents had been deported.

In May 1945, Erich Altmann was 41. He survived the hell of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, Oranienburg an two "death marches". For nearly three years, Erich Altmann found within himself the strength to survive and tell the world of the dimensions of the crime and the extent of the atrocities committed by the Nazis.

Eliezer Lewinsohn (known as Robby) was born in 1927 in Berlin. In 1933, his mother and he fled from Germany and took refuge in Lyon. Pursuing her charity work, his mother headed a reception centre for Jewish refugees. Robby learned to work the earth - and Judaism - at the Taluyers farm-school. As the hunting of dozens of Jews grew more intense, he shared in his mother’s activities and took an active part in the Jewish Resistance.