"Whether we like it or not, we are witnesses, we carry its burden". This sentence is extracted from one of the first letters Primo Lévi wrote to me after meeting again in April 1946: I was impressed by the letter… Yet, as for me, I could do it only 35 years later. I didn't have the courage or the opportunity to do it then.

Telling seems to me all the more urgent today as time's slipping by, and that we're are fewer and fewer to be willing or to be able to do it. What we - all those who came back from Auschwitz or other camps - care about, is to see how we'll be able to make ourselves replaced, when there no longer will be eyewitnesses - which is at hand. We're trying to organise an association of successors to witnesses. I think what we're doing is of vital importance for the future, for the memory of past events.

It happened a bit earlier than fifty-six years ago. Yesterday, April 11^th 2001, was a double anniversary for me: it was at the same time the day of my release, of my second birth in Buchenwald in April 1946 and also, unfortunately, the day my friend Primo Lévi died fourteen years ago. Primo Lévi, I owe him a lot and I rubbed shoulders with him in November '44 at the camp in Buna-Monowitz.

My name's Jean Samuel.

I was a chemist. My father was a chemist, and my two children are too. We had to leave Alsace in June 1940. In October, we ended up in the Lot-et-Garonne, in a small village called Lausse. While I was studying pharmacy and I was doing a degree in Toulouse, my mother's family cultivated because they were in charge of feeding everyone - even though it wasn't their trade originally.

We were arrested on March 2^nd 1944, that is to say more or less very late, by the Gestapo from Agen. Probably because we'd been denounced. My uncle, who hadn't been arrested, has tried to find evidence of it. We've never been able to prove it but it's almost certain. We were the only ones in the small village to be arrested, whereas a lot of others were Jewish refugees. They arrested eight members of the family: six men and two women. My father, a young brother who was seventeen and a half, three uncles, and I. My mother and a first cousin. The two women came back - my mother nearly a month after me. Among the six men, I'm the only one who came back.

From now on I'd like to stress on the fact that, out of the 76000 French Jews who were interned in concentration camps, about 2250 came back. None of those who came back owe it to their courage or intelligence, but only to luck. An incredible series of moments of luck.

I'll have the opportunity to tell you some instances.

We followed the traditional course: the prison in Agen, the prison in Toulouse, Drancy. After ten days, we left on March 27^th 1944 from Drancy - it must have been the 70^th of the 76^th convoy that left France, and arrived in Auschwitz on March 30^th.

It was a very difficult moment for everybody. Nobody expected to see the things we rapidly noticed. We spent three days and three nights in cattle trucks, we were more than 60 in each truck, everybody was put together, men, women, babies, sick persons, old people… when we arrived, when the doors opened, the howls of the SS welcomed us. They used huge dogs they set on people who didn't understand.

I also would like to say that the fact that I understood German was important.

Perhaps the most extraordinary stroke of luck is what happened to my mother. We got out. They made us jump on the railway track. That day, the officer was the notorious doctor Mengele, known for his works, if you can call that works, studies on Jewish children which were completely abnormal: he's 600 000 to 700 000 Jews on his conscience. He welcomed us. With his hand he indicated to the right or to the left, he sent us to the left. We rapidly realised they were people in relatively good health, from 15-16 to 60, men and women. And to the right, there was a line of trucks ready to take away babies with their mothers who didn't want them to be taken away, sick persons, elderly people.

In our group, only an older uncle was sent to the right. But my mother, a little woman who was tired and subject to fatigue, stood on her own authority in that row which - we heard it a few days later - lead straight to… More than 650 persons in our convoy - we were 1050 - were lead straight to the gas chamber, burnt in Birkenau - since it was the camp where these installations were.

And my mother was standing there very innocently. She said she was tired. And, believe it or not, this monster, who has so much Jews - young and old - on his conscience, took my mother twice by the scruff of the neck, put her on the left side and told her: "You're still able to work".

Why did he do that? One will never know. It's no easy thing to understand and to stand, that you owe your mother's life (who lived 34 years after the event) to such a monster.

There may be no better example of the chance and luck you needed in order to survive.

And may be when you believe in luck, and neither in strength nor in intelligence, you believe you're not guilty… You don't necessarily feel guilty of having survived, since there was very little you could do about it.

Definitely, you had to have the will to survive, but it wasn't enough, far from it. Above all you had to be lucky, whether you knew it or not.

We were undressed, shaved. They put us a number on the arm: mine was 176 397; my father had the previous number, and my brother the next number. While we stayed in Auschwitz, for at least ten months, it became our identity. And this too was very hard to stand. We weren't Samuel or Jean anymore. When you met an SS, you had to stand to attention, to take off your beret, to tell your number in German - which not everyone could do. It most certainly was a way to turn us into sub-humans, nearly into animals. At least they were trying to do it. Our fight consisted in staying human as far as possible. It was an everyday fight.

When we arrived, it was very important to keep appropriate reactions. The arrival certainly was the most important moment of our internment. The way we could adapt to the camp.

Another example… We dressed quickly: only a jacket (it was the beginning of spring so we no longer wore coats), a pair of trousers, no socks; and you had to choose a pair of clogs at random. When I say a pair of clogs, it was two clogs on a huge pile. If you had the bad luck to choose a clog which was too small or too large, no one talked about you anymore three weeks later: if you had the bad luck to take clogs at random which didn't fit you, you signed your own death warrant - since they couldn't treat infections at the infirmary.

Another fortune of life, a lucky one. A young prisoner asked me what my occupation was. I said I was studying pharmacy. So he told me: "It's not worth much here in the camp." So I said I had a degree in chemistry too: "Oh, chemistry, this can be useful!" so he registered me as a chemistry student. So, after two dreadful months in a commando unit where everybody died in two months time, that's how I joined the chemistry commando unit. It wasn't the perfect commando unit, but sometimes we didn't work outside. Work was hard too: from morning till night we carried sacks containing chemical which weighed 60-70 kg; they came by the trainload and we had to unload these sacks which were used for making synthetic rubber, Buna. Our camp was meant to build a factory Poland is still using today: a huge factory, which must be 20 sq km…

At the time, there also were STO [foreign civilians who were enlisted by force to work in German factories] from all over Europe with us. They were 25 000 and we were 12 000 in the Auschwitz camp 3 - Monowitz. I think that in this camp more than 30 000 died because they had worked too much: they died from exhaustion, within the few months we were there.

I wouldn't be able to describe a working day… we got up early in the morning, it was 4.30 in summer, 5.30 in winter. We ate very little, only liquid things: in the morning we got a so-called coffee with one eighth of a piece of bread, and your neighbour's always seemed to be bigger than yours; and in the evening we got soup in which, from time to time, there was a potato and, let's say once or twice a months, a tiny piece of meat. Our weight dropped to 45, 40 and even 35 kg for some of us.

Maybe I could tell you about two events which were particularly important to us. One of these happened in October, it was a Sunday afternoon… We were 250 in each block and in each work unit. They pushed us back on one side of the block… Then we underwent the same thing as when we'd arrived, apart from the fact we knew what would happen - contrary to when we arrived. We had to undress totally. The only thing we could wear was our clogs, if I may say so, and we had to walk and run past an SS, I don't even know if he was a doctor. And this man could decide, beyond dispute, whether you would die or live. It's impossible to try and imagine what crossed our minds at that moment. Even for me. Fortunately I think, because those who didn't forget have never managed to get out of the camp and have remained miserable all their life.

What I'm telling you is that we tried to stand up straight, to show we still were strong, although our legs were thick and our stomach was full of water. We were so weakened, but we had to give the impression that we still could be useful to the Third Reich, that we still were able to work… the fact is, even after that, we were deported to the west, and even in the end to the south, in Bavaria to work for the Nazis. This probably was the hardest moment inside the camp.

I'm skipping to the event which was even harder. It was in January '45, when we had to leave. The Russian troops were advancing. We'd already heard the Russian guns a few days before. It was awfully cold, -25°C. It had snowed, and there were 20 cm of snow. We were about 60 000 survivors out of more than a million who had arrived. Between '42 and '44, the number of people who arrived in Auschwitz is estimated at more than 1.1 million. We were 60 000 survivors and 6 000 sick persons (such as Primo Lévi who couldn't walk anymore and escaped death by miracle; eventually, Primo Lévi was released by the Russians on January 27^th 1945).

We were forced to hit the road, walking with our wooden clogs, barely dressed and weighing 40-45 kg. On the first night we walked 42 km: from Thursday afternoon January 18^th to Friday morning. After having walked for three hours in harsh conditions, we went on. In a bit less than two days, we walked 67 km. From a medical or physiological point of view, I think it's nearly unbelievable. We gripped to one another as far as possible. As soon as someone gave up, we heard a shot. On the road to Upper Silesia we left several thousands of pals behind who could no longer walk.

We arrived in Gleibitz (?). There, after one day, we got on a train again. Fortunately, it was an open train so that it was possible for us to eat the snow that had fallen on our neighbours' clothes with our spoon. We got a provision of supplies during our five-day trip on that open train. You don't die of hunger very rapidly; you die of thirst. But you can stand hunger.

In fact, I think we underestimate human resources which don't depend on our own will. It's something deeply rooted in ourselves, which allow us to sublimate, to do things that seem impossible at first.

After having nearly completely walked across Czechoslovakia, we arrived in Weimar on January 26^th, 8 days later. There, I unfortunately lost the only uncle who was with me: he died on January 31^st. It was an extremely difficult moment for me. I would bring the sad news to his wife and his little seven-year-old boy: they hadn't been deported with us and, if I survived, my sad duty was to tell them what had happened to him.

I found a fellow Parisian I didn't know. He was with me for the last three months. I owe him a lot since I survived. We were freed on April 11^th, after having worked in the mountains - in fact we dug a gallery where V1 were to be built. Then we walk 40 km in the opposite direction, with the Americans behind us.

Thanks to a series of miraculous events I have no time left to tell you, we managed to stay in Buchenwald - although the camp had been evacuated again towards Bavaria and very very few mates came back.

This is a quick sketch of the situation…

When I came home, I was the only man. I'd lost all the male members of the family on my mother's side. I was nearly 23 and became head of the family, which forced me to forget a bit all the things we'd been through and how we'd suffered.

It's only in 1980, thanks to Primo Lévi, that I could start telling - during an interview with him on the German television - in a language that made me suffer, that I found hard to listen to and even more to utter. Afterwards, and still today, it allowed me to go in secondary schools, when I'm asked to, only when I'm asked to, and to speak for a good while about these events and above all to answer the pupils' questions. And I think this generation is more sensitive than the first generation, the generation of our children: that of our grandchildren feels more concerned and more interested in the passing down of memory. We're trying to do our best to build what will come after ourselves.

Maybe Primo Lévi's poem which is at the end of the book "Si c'est un homme" can put an end to this brief and somewhat hard summary of 14 months in a concentration camp. In January 1946, he wrote this poem which has the same title as the book:

"Vous qui vivez en toute quiétude…"

I owe a lot to Primo Lévi. We met in the chemistry commando unit. As it happened, we had a common experience he told in "Le chant d'Ulysse" in "Si c'est un homme". I saw him very often afterwards: from 1946 to the year before he died.

Among other things, he was a great help to me when I had to survive in the camp. It also was important to speak and think about something else: learning Italian or doing maths with a brilliant pal called Jacques Felbot (?). He was a teacher in Strasbourg with whom, on the last night of our trip, I discussed the major Ferbot (?) theorem - he found the solution only 5 years ago in the USA. It's also one of the numerous moments of luck which allowed me to survive and to be here today to pursue the fight for memory.