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Auschwitz-Birkenau was a complex of concentration camps near the Polish city of Oswiecim established by Nazi Germany. The complex included three main camps: Auschwitz I, established in May 1940; Auschwitz II (also called Auschwitz-Birkenau) in early 1942; and Auschwitz III (also called Auschwitz-Monowitz). Prisoners incarcerated in the camps were forced to work under inhuman conditions, and the vast majority of them died of starvation or sickness. Nazi officials operated one camp as a killing center. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Web site accessed July 16, 2013.)

Charles Kopel Kaufman was born in Busko Zdrój, Poland on October 10, 1907. He immigrated to Paris, France in the early 1930s and married Malka Madeleine Frenkiel, who also had been born in Poland, on December 12, 1940. On August 20, 1941, French police arrested Kaufman in Paris and held him in the Drancy internment camp until June 22, 1942, when he was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Kaufman's wife was later arrested and deported to Auschwitz where she died on October 21, 1942.

On October 28, 1944, Kaufman and other prisoners left Auschwitz on a forced "death" march, and after enduring several camps, arrived at Buchberg, a sub-camp of the Dachau concentration camp. On May 1, 1945, soldiers of the U.S. Army's 42nd Infantry Division liberated the Buchberg camp, and Kaufman returned to Paris. Sometime after his liberation, Kaufman documented his experiences in four notebooks he wrote by hand in Yiddish. He grew up speaking both Yiddish and Polish.

Kaufman's adopted daughter, Nicole Rose of Moscow, Idaho, conserved the notebooks. In 2008, Yoseph Yahalom of Israel translated the notebooks into Hebrew, and in 2011, Devora Borik of Austin, Texas translated the Hebrew version into English. In 2012, Alan Rose, Nicole's husband, reviewed and made minor changes in the English version; that same year, Nicole Rose donated the original notebooks to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.