The Girl Who Survived Auschwitz

A powerful memoir from an Auschwitz survivor, intertwined with her daughter’s account of inherited trauma.

Poland, 1944 The train slowed and halted with a squeal of the brakes. It felt like we waited in the carriage for an eternity, but eventually, the heavy doors opened, directly into the chaos outside.

Sara Leibovits, a 16-year-old Jewish girl, was a passenger on the train, together with her family. Within minutes, their horrific fate was sealed.

The little family spent its final minutes together on the platform at Auschwitz, before its members were ordered in all directions and each left to their own fate. Her mother and baby brothers were sent to their deaths. Her father was made a Sonderkommando, one of the men forced to remove the bodies from the gas chambers, and was later executed.

This is the powerful true story of Sara Leibovits and the incredible pain and hardships she went through. Yet despite the horrors she faced she always tried to maintain her families’ values of courage, faith and kindness to others. Her story is intertwined with that of her daughter, Eti, seventy years later, who embodies the voice of the second generation and completes the Holocaust survivors’ tale.