‘We weren’t born in Hitler’s time, most of our parents weren’t born, except my father, who was a fifteen-year-old sports freak when he came to power. Hitler was the German Führer, sort of like an all-powerful imam in a peaked cap and a black uniform. He had this thing called Nazism which was like a new religion. All the Germans wore swastikas round their necks, a swastika was a symbol that meant: I’m a Nazi, I believe in Hitler, I live through him and for him. He outlawed loads of things, just like the imam with this fatwa he’s issued, then when Hitler had the Germans well trained, when they were proper Nazis obsessed with this new religion, with their Führer, he declared that all Jews, foreigners, immigrants, cripples, people with one arm, like you, Manchot, brainiacs like Togo, prodigies like Cinq-Pouces, motormouths like Idir-Quoi, people who were a bit soft in the head like Raymond here, mixed-race kids like me and halal butchers’ sons like Momo should all be wiped out. He said they were impure, an inferior race, said they didn’t deserve to live, and he said the parents that had given birth to them were to die in the fire with them. Hitler ordered all the Jews in Europe, including the ones here in France, to wear a yellow star on their chest so it would be easier for the cops to haul them in. And he had millions of people burned in furnaces. Not little ones like the one near the old train station, vast incinerators, bigger than the ones they use to burn the rubbish on the estate, and much better organised. You get the picture? Millions of men, women and children snatched off the streets, dragged to some nearby stadium where they were branded with a red hot iron, then packed into cattle trucks and shipped off to extermination camps where they wait around for days, weeks, even months, barefoot in the snow, for someone to come and burn them. Every day, the Nazis pick some random group, tie them up with barbed wire and dump them on a conveyor belt that went more or less right to the mouth of this huge furnace. The prisoners are so scared, they don’t even scream, and it doesn’t matter even if they do because there’s no one to hear but themselves. And it’s not just Nazis who are in charge, some of the people doing the work are prisoners – mostly young, fit guys like us – called Kapos. While they’re waiting their turn, they work as guards, shovel coal into the furnaces, check the thermostat, keep track of the number of dead, rip out the prisoners’ hair, their teeth – and know what they do with the ashes? They make fucking soap and candles for the soldiers. And it goes on and on like this, day after day, for months, years . . .’