Written when she was 89, her book covers her entire life and does not dwell on her time in Auschwitz or her experiences in Nazi labor camps. She deals with her experiences as the extermination camp's librarian in just a few sentences. There were only about a dozen books that Jewish prisoners had brought with them and were left behind after their deaths. Only 14 years old at the time, she was briefly put in charge of them.
Kraus writes about the deaths of her parents, the starvation diet she and other prisoners endured and the work she was forced to do to stay alive. She survived only by lying about her age, saying she was a year older than she actually was. A teenage girl at the time, she seems to remember more about the boys she liked than the horrors of camp life.
Most of the book deals with her life after the war, first as a translator for British soldiers, then as a wife and mother and settler in the new state of Israel. Her description of life in a kibbutz is particularly interesting. She tells about the kibbutz raising pigs, not caring about Jewish dietary laws, while residents were disciplined if they used the name of Jesus when they swore. There were no marriages. Couples simply declared that they wanted to live together.
In the end, Dita Kraus looks back on a full and rewarding life, even if it was delayed by that horrible experience as a prisoner of the Nazis when she was apparently doomed to an early death.
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