France, Jan. 25 -- On a frosty Polish winter evening, 96-year-old Esther Senot told the 100 or so shivering students at Auschwitz-Birkenau how she was a teenager much like them when she was first brought to the Nazi death camp on 2 September, 1943.

Senot said her older sister, so frail and gaunt she was barely recognisable, made her vow to pass on the memory of the camp, a macabre monument to Nazi Germany's genocide of the Jews.

"She told me, 'I won't make it any further. You're young: promise me that if you make it out, that you'll tell this story so that we're not the forgotten ones of history'," Senot said.

Now nearly 97, Senot returned to the site of her captivity to fulfil her promise to her sister, handing down those memories of ...