“Our whole family was sent to Auschwitz together. Through the cracks in the cattle car, I saw scores of slow-moving people in striped clothes, with no hair, in miserable shape. Some of them, as they saw the train, started lifting both arms upwards. I thought this was some kind of a lunatic asylum.

The day after our arrival, my two sisters and I started asking around about where our parents were. “There, up there are your parents,” one of the prisoners, a Polish girl, told me, and pointed her arms to the sky.

We stuck together. The three of us slept in the same bunk and watched out for each other. Anicka, the oldest, worked as a helper in the kitchen.

She wore a long overcoat and into it she had sewn secret pockets. Every evening she brought me and my sister Rose a potato or two. She was daily risking her life to feed the two of us. We all survived.”