Bitter memory

Holocaust Survivor seeks teens to bear witness for future

DRANCY, France, Feb 4, (AP): The girls and boys in the room were just a little older than Victor Perahia was when he was finally freed in 1945, his body wracked with tuberculosis and typhus, his mind anguished by the suffering and death he had seen. After 40 years of self-imposed silence, he now returns time and again to bear witness at Drancy, the transit center from where the French government deported tens of thousands of Jews into the hands of Nazis.

“From the day of my arrest to the day of my liberation, I will tell you my story,” Perahia said. He sat with his back to the window overlooking the Drancy housing project, where he spent 21 months. It was the last place in France his father and grandfather saw before they were loaded into a train bound for the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.

The students from a middle school in nearby Livry Gargan held their breaths, their eyes fixed on Perahia’s lined face.

Perahia spoke to the students last week amid a series of events to mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Surveys in recent years, including one released this year, show young people in France and elsewhere in Europe increasingly question the scale of the Holocaust, although outright denial is rare.

Perahia told the students he was 9 when six German soldiers stomped upstairs to the family apartment in the coastal town of Saint-Nazaire. They kept him hostage while his mother ran to fetch his father, who demanded to know what was happening.

“We are here for a simple identity check. You will follow us, along with your wife and your child, and in 48 hours, you will be home again,” the officer told his father.

Perahia