Few were given the opportunity to leave the concentration camp established by the German SS at Bir-kenau-Auschwitz II alive. To be able to narrate what happened there, to describe the scenes of horror, to recall with a thrill of horror the havoc that was wrought not only on the flesh but also on the human soul and on every civil feeling, is a privilege reserved for very few; and very few, like myself, had the good fortune to penetrate the most mysterious recesses of those accursed enclosures and to witness, while surviving, the destruction of thousands and thousands of human beings from almost all the nations of Europe; of all those nations that from September 1, 1939 until the early dawn of 1945, German brutality enslaved and tamed with the fear of its military power, deporting en masse the inhabitants that it could not immediately kill with weapons, to let them rot in the various concentration camps that swarmed throughout the Europe occupied by the Germans or their satellites, from Belgrade to Dachau, from Buchenwald to Gleiwitz.