EUGENE Black clutches a copy of his registration records, holding back the tears as he does so.
"I was born in 1928 but my records say 1926. The father of a friend of mine had told me to lie about my age and put down that I was an electrician and not a student.
"If you were too young you couldn't work in the labour camps and you would be killed in the gas chambers.
"I had forgotten all about this until they gave me my records at Buchenwald," he says.
Buchenwald, in Germany, was the first of three concentration camps – Dora and Bergen-Belsen being the others – that he visited last month with his daughter, Lillian, and son-in-law Frank.
It was the first time the 77-year-old had returned to the camps – scene of perhaps the worst atrocities in human history – since his liberation 60 years ago.
For Eugene, who lost his parents and his two sisters in the terrifying gas chambers at Auschwitz, it was an understandably emotional trip.
Buchenwald is the only camp that still has the original records of its prisoners but he was unaware they existed until the curator of the camp's museum, showed them to him.
Eugene who now lives in Pool, West Yorkshire, arrived at Buchenwald in May 1944 and spent the next 11 months struggling to survive the squalor and degradation of the concentration camps.
Although the barracks where he and thousands of fellow Jews were detained no longer exist, the site has been preserved and some buildings reconstructed to remind and educate visitors about the atrocities committed by the Nazis.
"When I saw it the memories came flooding back, you can still see the original wire going round the camp. It was just like being back there 60 years ago."
A simple stone denotes the site of the barracks which once held tens of thousands of prisoners. Eugene was in one of the smaller, satellite camps. "It's where they tried to contain epidemics. It was the worst part of the camp, you had fewer rations so if you were sent there you were not expected to survive."
Eugene was classified as a Hungarian Jew; he came from a town called Mukacevo now part of Ukraine, and he met several other survivors during his trip.
Some had been back before but many, like Eugene, had returned for the first time to confront the demons of their past.
"I met one survivor who was in block 66 and I was in block 62. We had the same story and I can't describe in words how I felt, but by the time I left Buchenwald it was like a chapter of my life had closed." He says he was impressed by the attitude of the younger generation of Germans he met. "They said how sorry they were for what happened. They had come to learn about the atrocities that their own forefathers had committed against the Jews in the name of national socialism. I could see the expressions on their faces, they were deep in thought. I think they were looking for an answer to how their parents and grandparents could create places like these and destroy millions of people's lives so easily."
After Buchenwald he went to the labour camp at Dora, where he spent nearly six months working as a slave labourer on Hitler's V2 rocker programme.
Dora was one of the most notorious labour camps because of the harrowing conditions workers were forced to endure.
Eugene worked in the tunnels, which were up to a mile long, loading huge rocks onto small wagons ready for transportation. Even now, 60 years later, he couldn't bring himself to venture back into the tunnels where he was forced to work up to 16 hour shifts in complete darkness.
The last camp he visited was Bergen-Belsen, where Anne Frank died. He was among hundreds of survivors from all over the world who were invited to a special memorial service commemorating the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation. The site of the former concentration camp is littered with mass graves, each marked by a simple stone.
For Eugene it was a chance to meet fellow survivors and face a past that had always been too horrific to comprehend. "I never felt I would have the courage to go back," he says. "I lived in silence for 50 years but having come back and seen everything again and spoken to the young people I've come to the conclusion that there are good people in the world and there is hope for the future." He admits, though, that he still has no idea how or why he survived and struggles to rationalise what happened to the millions who died in the camps.
"After the war ended I suddenly realised I was free, but I had lost everything, I had no identity and no future and my family perished, but I was very fortunate that I met my future wife, Annie, and we had a happy life together.
"My thoughts now about what happened to me and millions of others are simply this – it must never happen again, there cannot be another Holocaust."
chris.bond@ypn.co.uk