Eugène Klein had an extraordinary, multi-faceted life, which he describes here along with his rich and hitherto unpublished eyewitness account. Eugène spent his youth in Hungary in a state of cruel deprivation. He was able to settle and found a family in France, in the period between the two wars. As Jews, Eugene and his family faced the Nazi persecutions. They were arrested in Paris on May 1, 1943 and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

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.

Régine Skorka-Jacubert was born in Poland is in 1920. Her family subsequently emigrated to Nancy. In May 1940, the exodus took them to Bordeaux. Her family was sent to the La Lande camp near Tours. Fleeing to Lyon, she joined the Jewish resistance with her brother Jérôme who had managed to escape from the La Lande camp. In 1944, Régine and Jérôme were arrested by the French Militia. Identified as Jews, they were interrogated by Klaus Barbie and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Simon Grinbaud is the second son of a Jewish family from Poland who settled in France before the war. Unlike his family, Simon managed to escape the Paris police roundups. He was, however, arrested in the police roundup of August 26, 1942 in the southern zone, where he had met up with his brother Henri. They were both deported in the Convoy N°32, September 14, 1942.

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.

"Pitchipoi" was a strange name that sounded unpleasant to us, Provençal Jews who had grown up with the patois of the South of France. It was at Drancy, the camp where out family was interned that we first heard the word Pitchipoi. We didn’t know its origin in the Yiddish culture of Poland in which it referred to a little imaginary village. “We knew even less what was to be the reality of this unknown destination for those interned at Drancy. When we discovered it, all hope vanished. It was Auschwitz.

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.

This book tells the tragic story of Adèle Grossman, a young Polish Jew from the region of Lodz. Having lost most of her family, she found herself alone in Auschwitz, in Birkenau and then in the Stutthof camp. Left for dead at the time of the evacuation, she had to undergo amputation of both her legs, frozen during the "death march". Despite all her physical suffering, despite the unspeakable pain of losing her close relatives, Adèle maintained an inner strength to the continue to live and to found a family.