Izieu

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Izieu, village in France, at the Rhone river, between Lyon and Chambery in central France. During the Second World War site of a Jewish orphanage. On April 6, 1944, , three vehicles pulled up in front of the home. The Gestapo, led by the 'Butcher of Lyon' Klaus Barbie, entered the home and forcibly removed the forty-four children and their seven supervisors, throwing the crying and terrified children on to the trucks.

As a witness later recalled: 'I was on my way down the stairs when my sister shouted to me: It's the Germans, save yourself! I jumped out the window. I hid myself in a bush in the garden. I heard the cries of the children that were being kidnapped and I heard the shouts of the nazis who were carrying them away.'

Following the raid on their home in Izieu, the children were shipped directly to the "collection center" in Drancy, then put on the first available train towards the death camps in the east.

Forty-two children and five adults were gassed in the extermination camp of Auschwitz. Two of the oldest children and Miron Zlatin, the superintendent, ended up in Tallinn in Estonia and were put to death by a firing squad.

One survivor of Auschwitz revealed during Klaus Barbie's trial what happened to the children: 'I asked myself where were the children who arrived with us? in the camp there wasn't a single child to be seen. then those who had been there for a while informed us of the reality. 'You see that chimney, the one smoke never stops coming out of . .. you smell that odor of burned flesh ... ?'