The Associated Press. DRANCY, France AP β The girls and boys in the room were just a little older than Victor Perahia was when he was finally freed in , 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. 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.
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. The lie was revealed two days later. They were in a detention camp near the city of Tours when still more German officers separated men from women and children, Perahia told the teens, his voice steady. Because maybe he thought that it would be the last time that we would see each other. Convoy Number 8, like nearly all the convoys from Drancy, was bound for Auschwitz.
But here before them was a man for whom this was not history but bitter memory. He told them about the children he had known, the teens who took care of babies whose parents were deported, before they themselves were gathered up and told they would join their families.
