Simon Gutman will spend this weekend sitting quietly inside his Paris apartment, contemplating the many friends and family he has lost.

Late August is a time when the city marks its liberation from Nazi occupation, and this year, three-quarters of a century since the start of the six-day battle that finally forced the German garrison to its knees, the celebrations will be special.

But 95-year-old Mr Gutman is in a more sombre mood. He prefers to dwell on another commemoration just a few days earlier, one which recalls the persecution of Parisian Jews such as him.

Yesterday, a dwindling band of survivors gathered in the Paris suburbs to mark the liberation of the Drancy internment camp, where Simon’s torment first began, a place known for good reason as ‘the gateway to Auschwitz’.

Simon Gutman, 95, pictured, spent eight months in Paris' Drancy camp before being sent to Auschwitz. He survived by pretending to be a chef

Thanks to astonishing good luck and no small amount of chutzpah, Simon survived one of the bleakest episodes in human history and he did it by pretending to be a five-star chef for SS officers. He could barely boil an egg. But, as a fellow prisoner warned him, it was a case of ‘cook or die’.

Built in the 1930s, Drancy was once a modernist housing estate in the north-east Paris suburbs before the occupying Germans decided to turn it into a holding pen for Jews and a small number of political prisoners.

Its five-storey apartment blocks were converted into dormitory-style cells, and barbed-wire fences and watchtowers were erected around the perimeter.

Letters from prisoners in the early days show a sense of baffled naivety. Fathers told their Parisian children they were ‘not far away’ and ‘would be home soon’. This was before Hitler has settled on his plan to eliminate European Jewry in its entirety.

There was an official capacity of 5,000 at the main centre, and five sub-camps were used for ‘overflow’ prisoners. These sub-camps also served as warehouses for property stolen from the Jews of Paris.

While so much is known about Eastern European extermination camps, the true extent of Gallic collaboration is less understood, in part because of shameful attempts at covering it up.

Drancy, pictured, was a housing estate in the north-east Paris suburbs before the Germans decided to turn it into a holding pen for Jews and a small number of political prisoners

Finally the French have admitted culpability for the part they played in the Holocaust but it was only as recently as July 2012 that the then president François Hollande publicly admitted that the deportation of Parisian Jews such as Gutman had been ‘a crime committed in France by France’.

Earlier this year, 49 survivors received the equivalent of £310,000 each in reparations for France’s trains being used to deport them.

The Nazis chose Drancy because it was next to Bourget-Drancy railway station, from which more than 70 deportation convoys of Jews would head across Europe to concentration camps and, for the most part, to their deaths.

Simon, pictured sitting left, and his friends managed to escape while on a Death March in 1945. They briefly stayed near Altshausen in southern Germany and it was there that the five posed for a photo

Between August 1941 and August 1944, some 70,000 passed through.

Simon was one of the first. He spent eight months in the camp before he was herded on to the infamous Convoy Number 1 to Auschwitz. Today, he weeps as he describes the ‘barbarous days that seemed to last a lifetime’ and which continue to dominate his waking hours and his nightmares. Almost all of his family were interned at Drancy before they, too, were sent 1,000 miles away to Eastern Europe. Only Simon and his father survived.

The Gutmans had originally been from Warsaw but, with anti-Semitism on the rise in the 1930s, the family fled to France and settled in a tiny studio flat in the 10th Arrondissement, both parents working 15 hours a day as tailors. Simon was six.

Yet Paris was no safer than Warsaw Following the German occupation of 1940, all French Jews were listed as enemies by Theodor Dannecker, the German SS officer responsible for ‘round-ups’ in the city.

As a ‘Judenberater’ (translated as ‘Jewish adviser’ – Nazi SS officials who supervised the deportation of European Jews), Dannecker worked with French officials and the collaborating Vichy government in the south to rid France of its Jews.

Simon was an 18-year-old student when police officers first summoned him and his family to their local station in Paris on August 21, 1941.

They were told it was a ‘situation review’, but for Simon the result of the ‘review’ was a rat-infested cell in Drancy, deprived of food and water.

At Drancy there was an official capacity of 5,000 at the main centre, and five sub-camps were used for ‘overflow’ prisoners. Pictured is the camp in 1942

The Nazis chose Drancy, pictured in 1942, because it was next to Bourget-Drancy railway station, from which more than 70 deportation convoys of Jews would head across Europe

At that time, the camp was controlled by French police.

Time passed painfully slowly for Simon. He was locked up for long hours in a cramped cell with other inmates of all ages and, even when he was allowed into the courtyard, this was often a form of punishment, with the guards forcing prisoners out whatever the weather.

‘It felt like time stopped still. Every day felt like a century,’ he says.

Then, after eight months imprisonment, he was ordered on to the first convoy heading east. He can remember the day vividly. The weather was unseasonably warm and, huddled together with thousands of other prisoners, he listened nervously as a guard barked out 565 names who were told to ‘be ready in quarter of an hour’ for a 5pm departure.

‘We remained silent, and strangely optimistic about at least getting out of Drancy,’ Simon says pensively. ‘We had no idea what was to come.’

More prisoners were collected from the Royallieu-Compiègne internment camp, 60 miles north of Paris, making a total of 1,112 men.

Simon was 18 when police officers summoned him and his family in 1941. They were told it was a ‘situation review’, but Simon was then put in a rat-infested cell in Drancy. Pictured are men at the internment camp in December 1942

Simon had no idea of the real horror that lay ahead and, as he boarded the first convoy alongside various friends, he believed they might be on the way to cut timber in the Ardennes.

Cattle carts were not yet used for deportations – this would start a few months later when women and children arrived at Drancy – but the conditions aboard were already unspeakable. ‘We were piled on top of each other, and were unable to move during a trip that lasted three days and three nights,’ Simon recalls. ‘Not even the Red Cross workers gave us a drink of water.’

‘In Reims, the French gendarmes were replaced by SS guards and we then understood that the situation was very serious because we knew we were going east.’ He was right. The ultimate destination of Convoy 1 was what was a then-unheard-of place near Krakow in occupied Poland – the death camp now infamous as Auschwitz-Birkenau. ‘The killing started as soon as we got there,’ he continues. ‘We were stripped, and given a prison uniform and a number that was tattooed on our arms in blue.

‘If we forgot this number, we were immediately beaten or killed. We were given wooden shoes that didn’t fit and walked to the Birkenau camp, around three kilometres away. The road was muddy and anyone who fell was shot.’

After spending time in Drancy, Simon was sent to Auschwitz where he pretended to be a chef to survive. Pictured is a poster

Simon’s number was 27815 – it remains clearly visible on his right underarm to this day. His brother Maurice was on Convoy 4, leaving in June 1942, while his sister Hélène and other brothers Serge and Isidor were on Convoys 15 and 23. David, Simon’s father, was on Convoy 12 that departed in July 1942. His mother, Cyma, was sent east with her sister, Bella, in March 1943.

After just a few weeks came the stroke of good fortune that would save Simon’s life: when a fellow prisoner helped him get a job in the kitchen feeding German officers. This man was not Jewish but a so-called ‘Red Triangle’ – a German in prison for opposing the Nazi regime (the triangle refers to an identification badge). ‘He told me that my only chance to live was cooking – to cook or die,’ recalls Simon. ‘He then told the other German prisoners that I was an impeccable cook who had worked in the best hotels in Paris.’

Oberscharführer (squad leader) Hendler, the chief cook, was impressed, and appointed Simon as his only Jewish assistant. ‘Nobody knew that I had no idea how to cook,’ says Simon with a wry smile.

The kitchen role also meant that he could care for his father when he arrived at Auschwitz, handing him scraps of food. He says that it was common at Auschwitz for fathers to be ordered to kill their sons, and vice versa, with refusal leading to both being shot dead. But they were spared this fate.

Towards the end of the war, Simon contracted typhus and ‘was left for dead under a pile of bodies’ rather than being rounded up and sent to a gas chamber.

In February 1945, he finally escaped with four other friends during one of the notorious ‘Death Marches’ organised by the retreating SS. They eventually met up with elements of France’s 2nd Armoured Division – the one that had helped liberate central Paris – and Drancy just a few days earlier – in August 1944. ‘There was great emotion,’ he says. ‘The soldiers stood in front of us and saluted.’

The five Jews were still in their striped concentration camp uniforms which, with typical black humour, Simon referred to as ‘our tuxedos’. They briefly stayed near Altshausen in southern Germany and it was there that the five posed for a remarkable photograph.

Simon sits on the left of the group, which includes a 12-year-old boy who had escaped with him. ‘I often said I was born in April 1945 – the time I escaped from imprisonment,’ Simon says reflectively.

He finally returned to Paris in April 1945, where he learned that the only other member of his family to survive was his father David, then 46. When they were reunited at the five-star Lutétia hotel – which had been transformed into a regrouping centre after years of use by the Nazis, Simon was distressed by the skeletal man in front of him.

Simon said staying alive has been his way of defying the ‘sadists’ who took so much from him and his people. He is pictured in 2012

So ill was his father, he was at first unable to recognise Simon. But the pair were soon united in an ‘indescribable grief’ that would never leave them. They discovered that other family members had been caught in the Vel d’Hiv Roundup of July 16, 1942, when more than 13,000 Jews, including 4,000 children, had been taken to Paris’s Winter Velodrome (Vélodrome d’Hiver) before most were deported to their deaths.

Today Simon sits at home in the Marais, once a Jewish quarter and now one of the most sought-after locations in Paris. It is less than ten miles from Drancy, which is once again a housing estate, albeit one with a monument, a museum and original railway wagon marking its terrifying past.

Simon was one of only 19 men out of 1,112 from Convoy Number 1 who ever saw Paris again. Staying alive, he says, has been his way of defying the ‘sadists’ who took so much from him and his people. He has since been determined to lead as successful a life as possible, building up the tailoring business started by his father – and raising a family of his own.

‘This was all so important to me – to carry on with my life, and to show that survivors would not be defeated,’ he says defiantly.

Despite his wartime experience, Simon remains proud of France and the life he was able to build for himself and his family. He was not among those who recently claimed compensation from the state.

Simon has never been afraid to return to Drancy but ill-health kept him away from yesterday’s ceremony to mark the 75th anniversary of its liberation. He says: ‘That won’t stop me from remembering everybody including my closest family members and friends.’

His wife, Bella, died four years ago at the age of 89, while his son, Jean-Sylvain, and daughter, Irene, live close by, as do his three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Simon’s housekeeper Khadiya El-Mardhi, a 66-year-old from Morocco, sits with us throughout the interview. She has helped Simon recall details of his remarkable life. The two are now close friends.

‘Mr Gutman is full of wisdom and we should all learn from him,’ says Khadiya. ‘If anybody can teach us how we should all live together in peace, then it is Mr Gutman.’