Introduction

thirteen years old and helpless. I could not believe that I was living through these horrors. No civilized country could do this to us, especially the Germans, one of the most progressive and cultured societies of the time.
    Today, the world appears to be a different place, but some things have not changed. Although Europe and the two Germanys have been reunited, hatred and bigotry still exist. With economies failing, people are looking for scapegoats. The Neo-Nazis are resurfacing. Again, people are looking the other way. Serbs are committing atrocities against their neighboring Croats in a chillingly familiar attempt at "ethnic cleansing" of Sarejavo and Bosnia. As much as I might wish, I can not bring anyone back from the grave, but perhaps I can prevent this and other generations from closing their eyes and ears. It is said that those who do not learn from the past are destined to repeat it. If it happened to me, it can happen to you.
    There have been books published claiming that the holocaust was a hoax - that it never happened. Of my own family in Europe I am now the sole survivor from a family of more than one hundred members. Some people may question the validity of the pictures of my family and me that appear in this book. How did I gain possession of photos if my family did not survive and I was always on the run? The pictures were given to me by my uncles, who were in the United States during the war, and my oldest brother, Jacob, who was living in Palestine before the war. My story may be shocking, but it is true without exaggeration. It is not something that was fabricated in Hollywood.
    A collective damage was done so many years ago to all the Holocaust survivors - invisible scars that cannot heal and will sink with us into our graves. We have blended into society and seemingly have gone on with our lives, but the terror of our pasts haunts us day and night in the caverns of our memories. Daily incidents will trigger a memory. Sometimes, my children's faces remind me of my own brothers and sister. I pray that they will never experience what I went through. To this day, I have yet to be able to confront them or anyone else without revealing my pain. The tears in my eyes and the choked up feelings come flooding back when I attempt to speak of my experience. Perhaps, after all these years I can heal myself of the shame of survival by taking the responsibility of telling my story. Each survivor's experience is unique, and i know that it is my responsibility to tell my story - to tell the truth about what happened.

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