At the age of 17, Ruth Elias was sent to Auschwitz in Fall 1943. Her Nazi captors discovered that she was pregnant and placed her under the care of the infamous of Josef Mengele, who subjected her to a most cruel medical ordeal.

Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. All the men in Ada Lichtman’s town of Wieliczka were rounded up by the SS, and shot. One of them was Lichtman’s father, a cobbler. From then on, she was possessed by a single question: “how will I be killed?”

In 1940, Nazis designated the district of Bałuty, in the city of Lodz, Poland, as a ghetto. Paula Biren’s account of the daily operations and moral decline of the population subjected to massive deprivation of food and freedom is unwaveringly frank.

Hanna Marton, an Auschwitz prisoner, was acutely aware that her freedom from the camp was purchased by a close family friend. Her sense of guilt about having been privileged in convoy is deeply felt during her relentlessly painful account.