Keeping France's dark history alive
By Jim Bittermann
CNN Senior Correspondent
 |  If he's asked, Fainzaing shows schoolchildren the number Nazis tattooed on his arm. |
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|  VIDEO |
 Jules Fainzaing teaches students about his Holocaust experience.
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PARIS, France (CNN) -- On a gray day, French high school students are learning about a dark heritage.
Several times a week, young people are brought to the drab suburbs of Paris to visit Drancy, the World War II transit camp where 70,000 French Jews, rounded up by their own countrymen, were stuffed into railroad boxcars and shipped off to Nazi concentration camps.
"It's good for (the students) to come to real places and see real people and to realize that it just happened, that it was the truth," says high school teacher Estelle Mondine.
Jules Fainzaing is among those who survived the Holocaust. A thousand people were in his trainload -- he is one of only eight who survived.
If the young visitors ask, he shows them the identification number the Nazis tattooed on his arm. It's just part of his living history lesson that he believes is essential to properly educate a new generation of Europeans
"That what I told them that this was something that happened to me, and that is more important than what you can find in books," he says.
In a world where Britain's Prince Harry thinks partying in a Nazi uniform is good fun -- and where former French presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen says the war years in France really were not all that bad -- the need to solidify the truth in European minds is behind much of the activity as the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz draws near.
Many say "The Downfall," a new German film portraying the last days of Hitler's regime, shows just how easy it is for large evils to grow from small crimes.
And as commemorations began in France for the Auschwitz remembrances, the mayor of Paris invited several hundred death camp survivors to a concert at City Hall.
Sixty years after they were spared from death in the concentration camps, the former deportees remain the most powerful weapon against those who try to forget or distort the past.
But it is a dramatic and living history that will not last much longer.
