When the Nazis invade Hungary on March 19, 1944, elementary school teacher Helena Jockel can only think about how to save "her" children. She accompanies them all the way to Auschwitz—only to see them taken to the gas chamber. Her account of living and surviving in the camp and on the subsequent death march is clear-eyed and poignant, sometimes recording the too-brief moments of beauty and kindness that accompany the unremitting cruelty. Returning to her passion for teaching after the war, she refuses to hide her Jewishness under a Communist regime that will not allow her to talk about the Holocaust.
