@ Drawings made during the deportation by four artists: France Audoul-Martinon (Ravensbrück), Louis Bissinger (Buchenwald), Gino Gregori (Mauthausen) and Jeanne Letourneau (Ravensbrück). Army Museum website, www.musee-armee.fr/actualites/ concours-national-de-la-résistance-et--de-la-déportation-2021-2022/

The Death March, we are not the ones who gave that name. And then, in these open wagons, I remember perfectly because I was the last to be counted, I was the 161st in this open wagon, there wasn’t enough space for everyone. After a while, the train left, well, since we were on top of each other, I remember boarding on a human sea, really. To resist. And the train was going on, on, on. We didn’t know where we were going. It was after that we learned that the SS, not knowing where to dump our bodies, were looking for camps likely to receive us. I knew that they had stopped in front of the Buchenwald camp, that they had stopped in front of the Mau-thausen camp. Then, we stopped at a certain point in Prague. We continued like that and one day, we arrived at Dora, where we went out. And I started working in this camp. But very quickly, the Allies came closer and there was another emigration. We were evacuated to the north and arrived at Bergen-Belsen, not the Anne Frank’s Bergen-Belsen, but the military barracks. And it was there that we were liberated by the English on April 15, 1945. Above all, I want to emphasize the fact that January 27, 1945, the day of the liberation of the Auschwitz camp, was not the liberation of the camps. This is only the beginning since on January 27 we were, already, we who were in Auschwitz and in the surrounding kommandos, well we had been on the snowy roads since January 18.” Haïm Vidal Sephiha, specialist in Spanish Judeo-Arabic, "Deportation and the death march, a testimony," Tsafon, no. 73, 2017

final' occurs while simultaneously, on June 22, 1944, the Red Army launches an offensive campaign, Operation Bagration. This marks the beginning of an inevitable breakthrough. In a few days, the Soviets completed the liberation of Belarus and Ukraine and penetrated into Polish territory, then approaching the eastern fron- lands of the Reich. At the same time, in the West, the Allies gain a foothold on the continent with the Normandy landings. Then began a series of prisoner transfers from Auschwitz to the KL within the country: between early July and late November 1944, 97,000 detainees were transferred in dozens of convoys. The month of October marks a real turning point in the camp’s history: while 39,000 people were still being transported from all over Europe to Auschwitz in September 1944, this figure fell to 6,000 the following month, revealing the redirection towards other refugee camps. Things that continue despite everything. When, on 12 January 1945, the Red Army resumed its march forward through Polish territory, triggering a new offensive, there remained about 67,000 prisoners in the three main camps of Auschwitz. And, on 17 January, 58,000 prisoners were thrown onto the roads, in turn starting the "death marches" to the camps set up within the Reich itself.

TESTIMONY OF HAÏM VIDAL SEPHIHA (1923-2019) DEPORTED TO AUSCHWITZ IN MARCH 1943 "On January 18, we went out on the roads and we didn’t know that by then the great massacre would begin because in reality all the camps of Silesia had been emptied of their survivors, since we were survivors, we must not forget it. And we were sent into the snow, snow up to our knees, walking all day long. The first part of this evacuation, that’s what we called later

Hélène Persitz (1912-2006)

Hélène Vestermans was born on August 4, 1912 in Latvia. On November 4, 1941, she married Alexandre Persitz in France. In Nice, the couple was arrested on 22 March 1944, upon denunciation, then transferred to Drancy, and deported by convoy no. 71 to Auschwitz on 13 April 1944. In the end, Hélène is selected for the work. She is designated as an interpreter, thanks to her knowledge of Russian and German. Auschwitz was evacuated on January 18, 1945, to the ap- proximate of the Soviet troops. A few days later, in Upper Silesia, she is loaded into freight cars without roof, without refueling and without water. Arrived at the Ravensbrück camp on February 11, 1945, and was transferred to the Malchow camp. The camp was evacuated as the Allied armies approached. She was released on May 2 in the village of Luebz by the Americans. Repatriated via Belgium and Lille, she arrived in Paris on May 16, 1945. She finds her husband, who came back on his side a week earlier.

Jorge Semprun (1923-2011)

Son of a family of Spanish Republicans who took refuge in France in 1939, Jorge Semprún was at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris during the occupation. Communist militant, he joined the ranks of the resistance movement FTP-MOI and became a member of an intelligence network. Arrested by the Germans in 1943, he was sent to Compiègne where he was deported on 27 January 1944 to Buchenwald. He took part in the organization of the clan resistance, which had been set up by the communists, and was assigned to one of the administrative departments: among other things, he was responsible for organizing the cultural activities of inmates at Buchenwald, especially Spanish ones. Among the many people deported to Buchenwald that he knew were Maurice Halbwachs and Henri Maspero, both professors at the Collège de France, who succumbed to the camp. Jorge Semprun survives and will devote many stories to his experience in the concentration camp. «I was indeed going to visit Maurice Halbwachs and try, once again, to find my young French Muslim in the collective latrine shack. [ ] But that day, Maurice Halbwachs was not able to react to my questions or take part in a conversation. We were at the end of December 1944, he would not die until weeks later, in mid-March 1945, but he had already sunk into a drowsy, ataractricous immobility.” Jorge Semprun, Le mort qu'il faut, Paris, Gallimard, 2001.

▲ Léon Delarbre, The transport from Dora to Bergen, April 1945. This journey through Germany lasted five days and four nights in the rain and cold. © Museum of Resistance and Deportation, Besançon

▲ © Shoah Memorial.