“You lose your loved ones, and still you want to live.”

On 21 July 1942, the Nazis reached the small Polish town of Zolkiew. Life for fifteen-year-old Clara Kramer would never be the same. While those around her were either slaughtered or transported, three families found perilous refuge in a hand-dug cellar. Hers was one of them.

Living above and protecting them were the Becks. Mrs. Beck had been the families’ maid. Mr. Beck was alcoholic and a self-professed anti-Semite, yet he risked his life to keep his charges safe. But survival under his protection proved to be anything but predictable. Whether it was his nightly drinking sessions with officers of the SS in the room just above or his torrid affair with one of the hiding women, it seemed that Clara and the others often had as much to fear from Beck as they did from the war.

Clara’s mother told her to keep a diary while they lived in the bunker in order to fill her time and “so the world would know what happened to us.” Over sixty years later, Clara Kramer has finally turned those diaries into a compelling and heartbreaking memoir — a story of love and memory and survival.

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"This vividly detailed and taut narrative is a fitting tribute to the bravery of victims and righteous gentiles alike."
— Publishers Weekly

"[A] superlative memoir of survival. . . . Few wartime memoirs convey with such harrowing immediacy the evil of the Nazi genocide."
— The Daily Telegraph

"A harrowing account. . . . full of heart-wrenching details. . . . And yet, somehow, miraculously, mercifully, humanity finds its way into this story."
— Montreal Gazette

"Both a gripping thriller and a heartbreaking drama of human kindness, this is sure to become a classic of Holocaust history."
— Booklist (starred review)

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Clara Kramer has dedicated her life to speaking about the Holocaust. Still today, at eighty-one years old, hardly a week goes by without her speaking publicly about her experiences. Her audience has included university presidents and politicians, but Clara’s passion is speaking to children. She is one of the founders of the Holocaust Resource Center at Kean University, New Jersey, which trains 1,200 teachers a year. She lives in New Jersey.

Clara’s diary, which she kept while in hiding, is in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

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