Her descriptions of Auschwitz and labor camps are brutal, frank and terrifying, all the more so because she keeps her observations personal and immediate, avoiding the sweeping rhetoric that has, understandably, become a staple of much Holocaust testimony. She relates, for example, how the yellow star made her feel marked and humiliated, reluctant to attend her school's graduation how existence in the ghetto, paradoxically, made her happy to be Jewish for the first time in her life how an aunt terrified the family by destroying their most valuable belongings before deportation, so that the Germans could not profit by them. She brings an artist's recall to childhood experiences, conveying them so as to stir fresh empathy in the target audience, even those well-versed in Holocaust literature. While the facts alone command attention, Bitton-Jackson's supple and measured writing would compel the reader even if applied to a less momentous subject. After a yearful of innumerable harrowing experiences, she was liberated. Born in a small farming town in Hungary, Bitton-Jackson was 13 when Nazis forced her and her family into a Jewish ghetto and then sent them to Auschwitz.
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