Passport for Auschwitz Correspondence of a doctor at the Drancy camp - Zacharie Mass

Éditions Le Manuscrit / Fondation pour la mémoire de la Shoah - 2012

These 80 letters, for the most part clandestine, were written by Dr Zacharie Mass to his wife Elisabeth from October 16, 1941 to July 31, 1943. They shed light on the organisation of the Drancy camp, illustrate the terrible conditions of internment and enable us to grasp from the inside the evolution of what was, for the Jews of France "the antechamber of death".

Through this correspondence, we can also read the determination of Dr Mass and the superhuman energy deployed by Elisabeth to get her husband out. But none of the protections that his Romanian passport might have accorded him - Romania was an ally of the Reich - nor his precarious state of health saved Zacharie from deportation and death.