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 September 2, 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 one of history's darkest chapters to the children on a school trip from France.

Between 1940 and 1945 the Nazis killed more than a million people at Auschwitz -- most of them Jews, but Poles, Roma and Soviet soldiers too -- during Germany's occupation of Poland.

"We'd been given figures in class but now we realised what people had gone through," said Charlotte, 16, discussing the trip a week later at her school in Versailles.

"Being born in 2008, I didn't think I'd have the experience of hearing a survivor," said her classmate Raphael, also 16.

But with the ranks of survivors dwindling with each passing year, Charlotte and Raphael may be part of one of the last........

© International Business Times