“We played a game of nostalgia, recalling memories of the past to forget, for a while, the terrible present . . . The siren at 5:00 a.m. woke us to the morning reality of roll call. We each wondered if we were going to be given another day of life.”
What keeps 15-year-old Gerta Solan going in the Auschwitz children’s barracks is dreaming of the normal life that had been torn from her. Deported with her parents from Prague to the Theresienstadt “model camp” in June 1942, Gerta Solan describes the lengths to which the Nazis went to mislead the International Red Cross about their treatment of Jewish prisoners. Then comes Auschwitz, where she has to learn to cope on her own with the corruption, brutality and desperation around her.
