By surviving the Holocaust I was given the gift of life a second time; that's how I look at it. I was incarcerated from May eighth, 1942, till May eighth, 1945, which happened to be my mother's birthday. At that point I didn't know she had been killed. I was still searching for her. And why were they killed: my mother, my father, my brothers? All in all sixty-three members of my family were killed. Why? Because of prejudice and bigotry, and hatred. So how do I live with that? How do I forgive them? What do I do? I always wanted to be the best person I could so that no finger could be pointed at me and say, “She's a Jew. She's not righteous.” I always wanted to do the best I could because of what happened to me, to prove I was worthy of having stayed alive.

Many times when I speak at schools, students ask me, “How come you stayed alive when your family and the six million did not?” I could never give an answer to that. I didn't know myself. Only by sitting down and writing my book did I learn how I survived. It was a set of circumstances. It was luck. It was where I stood at a given time, and of course what time of year it was. In my little prison dress, it was no stockings, just wooden shoes. Standing at the place where they counted us it was freezing cold or else it was so hot. It took me nearly twenty years to write this story and finally I figured out by writing. I could never find the voice I wanted to give it. I started writing in the third person. But when one does that, then we move one's self from what really one wants to convey. So I started all over again in the first person. That gave it the right voice – the voice of my voice when I was your age or younger. I’m now eighty-six years old and I was sixteen when it happened.