Magda Hollander-Lafon lived through the harshest darkness: As a Hungarian Jewish teenager, she was deported in 1944 to Auschwitz with the rest of her family, who all died. These pages, pulled from her experience close to death, focuses on quiet, emotional moments: breadcrumbs a dying woman gives her, the water they offer when a body is near its end, and the smiling woman who picked her up from the liberated camp. History is full of terrible deeds, but Hollander-Lafon communicates a happiness robbed from the hell that almost devoured her and nourished by a life of spiritual encounters.

Magda Hollander-Lafon is a writer and Holocaust survivor, the only one from her family. After WWII, she studied children's psychology and French.