PEAC: The Testimony of a Shoah Survivor
Friday 9 January
EVENT OVERVIEW:
In 2025, historian Alban Perrin published Les Cahiers d’Alter (Éditions du Seuil). In this talk, he returns to this powerful work and to a tragic chapter of history, ensuring that the story of Alter Fajnzylberg is not forgotten at a time when
the last living witnesses of the Holocaust are disappearing.
ABOUT ALTER FAJNZYLBERG
Born in 1911, Alter Fajnzylberg was a Holocaust survivor whose testimony holds exceptional historical significance. He is known in particular for his involvement in the clandestine photographs taken by members of the Sonderkommando in 1944 – images later used as evidence by the Supreme Court during the trial of several SS officers, including Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Before his deportation, Fajnzylberg’s life was marked by political commitment and exile. He fought with the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, was subsequently interned in the camps of Saint-Cyprien, Gurs, and Argelès-sur-Mer, and later arrested in Brittany. He was held at Drancy and Compiègne before being deported in the first convoy of 1942 to Auschwitz-Birkenau II, where he was forced to serve in the Sonderkommando.
He survived this ordeal and, between 1946 and 1956, recorded his experiences in three school notebooks. Carefully stored in a shoebox tied with a string that yellowed over time, these notebooks remained within the family for decades before being rediscovered by Roger Fajnzylberg.
With the support of Alban Perrin, who translated the original texts from Polish, Alter’s testimony was finally brought to light in the book What I Saw in Auschwitz, published seventy-seven years after the events. The account offers a rare and essential testimony to life in Auschwitz-Birkenau and to the mass murder of thousands of Jewish deportees in the gas chambers of Birkenau.
In this presentation, Alban Perrin explores in depth the life of Alter Fajnzylberg and the testimony of a Sonderkommando survivor, ensuring that his story continues to be passed on to future generations.
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- SPEAKER: Alban Perrin, historian affiliated with the Shoah Memorial, Paris
- DATE & TIME: Friday, 9 January 2026, 7:00 PM
- LOCATION: Amphi 3000 (Old Kindergarten)
- MODERATION: Ava Cherel Gross & Leopold Voog
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Alban Perrin is a historian and specialist in Holocaust studies. A graduate of the Institute of Political Studies in Bordeaux, he holds a DEA in political science. He works at the Shoah Memorial in Paris and teaches comparative analysis of 20th-century genocides.