Kitty Hart Moxon is ninety years old when she sets off to re-visit Auschwitz-Birkenau, one of the most infamous of the German death camps where millions of Jews, and so-called "enemies" of the Nazi party, were murdered during the regime of Adolf Hitler. She is accompanied by two high school girls who are fifteen years old, the same age that Kitty was when she and her mother were sent to Auschwitz.
For a time it had seemed that they might be able to escape this fate all together Kitty explains that a family friend, who was a priest, had managed to obtain papers for them that would enable them to leave German occupied Poland for safety, but before they could use them, someone informed the German authorities that they were Jewish; they were rounded up and sent to the camp. Once arrived, they took on menial work within the camp, which was not as physically demanding as the jobs outside the camp, which Kitty believes helped them survive the conditions. They also worked amongst the bodies of the dead, sorting through their belongings for the German officers. Sometimes they were able to take some possessions from the bodies and trade them with their fellow prisoners, for food and soap.
Kitty recalls working as a latrine cleaner, which is probably how she contracted typhus, a deadly water borne disease which she surprisingly survived, she believes, thanks to her father's insistence that she be vaccinated against it as a younger child.
In August 1944, Kitty tells of how the camp was rife with rumors about an evacuation. Sure enough, one hundred prisoners were scheduled to leave, her mother among them. Seeing the camp commandant pass by them one day, her mother approached him, and in German, asked that her daughter be allowed to accompany her. The German she spoke was formal, and deferential, something that appealed to the egotistical officers; Kitty believes this is the reason he agreed to the request. Both Kitty and her mother were taken to a concentration camp by the name of Gross Rosen.
Each day, they, and other prisoners, would be marched two hours to the Phillips electronics factory, where they worked, and then marched two hours back to the camp again at night. This job saved their lives; prisoners from Gross Rosen were chosen for a death march across the Sudenten mountains, but they were not selected for death, because it was believed that the Germans could use the skills they had learned at the factory for other projects, such as jamming transmission and intercepting intelligence from Allied airplanes.
Kitty tells of their final trip; they were taken by train to the death camp Bergen Belsen. The camp was one of the worst and most prisoners starved to death. The train they were crammed into stopped in the middle of nowhere, and the prisoners abandoned. Eventually those who did not die were rescued by German soldiers, but their rescue was short lived as they were taken to another camp, Salzwedel, where they were kept until April 1945. One day in April, all of the camp's guards disappeared.
Saturday April 14, 1945, a day that Kitty will never forget. The date is burned on her memory like the tattooed number burned into her wrist. Salzwedel was liberated by the American army. Both Kitty and her mother had survived. After their liberation they began to search for the rest of their family but quickly learned that there was nobody left to find. Kitty's father had been found by the Gestapo and shot. Her brother had died in the Battle of Stalingrad, fighting with the Russian army against the Germans. Her grandmother had died also, killed in the gas chambers shortly after arriving at Belzec.
