Born in Łódź in 1930, Guta recounts her experiences in the Holocaust. In 1939 the family, consisting of Guta, her father, and her younger sister (her mother had died in 1937) were interned in the Łódź ghetto. In 1941 her father died of pneumonia. Guta and her sister were sent to a children's home in the Marysin section of the ghetto, where her sister died of meningitis. Surviving a selection in September 1942, Guta was assigned to slave labour, first in a straw factory, then making dresses. When the ghetto was liquidated in summer 1944, she was deported to Auschwitz. After one month she was sent to Bergen-Belsen and then to a labour camp in Maltheuer, Germany, where she was liberated by the Americans in April 1945. In 1949 she emigrated to Australia. Guta’s memoir conveys, despite the horrors and cruelty around her, the resilient, life-affirming spirit of a remarkable child.
