RENA'S PROMISE: Two Sisters in Auschwitz

“Even in death one could still tell the families – all holding hands”. For a modern generation unaware, immune or indifferent to the horrors of the Holocaust, these simple words throw into sharp relief the very real and very personal tragedy perpetrated by the Nazi regime. Mass murder was systemically exacted on millions of innocent victims regardless of sex, age or understanding of the horrific events unfurling around them. These were not frontline soldiers ready to die in the line of duty. These were men, women and children rounded up like plagued animals and slaughtered on an industrial scale. This fully illustrated hardback book hopes to convey the true tragedy of the Holocaust with detailed accounts of the numerous concentration and death camps, the men and women responsible and the barely comprehensible human cost.

This heart-stopping story of a young girl hiding from the Nazis is based on Clara Kramer's diary of her years surviving in an underground bunker with seventeen other people.

Clara Kramer was a typical Polish-Jewish teenager from a small town at the outbreak of the Second World War. When the Germans invaded, Clara's family was taken in by the Becks, a Volksdeutsche (ethnically German) family from their town. Mrs. Beck worked as Clara's family's housekeeper. Mr. Beck was known to be an alcoholic, a womanizer, and a vocal anti-Semite. But on hearing that Jewish families were being led into the woods and shot, Beck sheltered the Kramers and two other Jewish families.

Eighteen people in all lived in a bunker dug out of the Becks' basement. Fifteen-year-old Clara kept a diary during the twenty terrifying months she spent in hiding, writing down details of their unpredictable life—from the house's catching fire to Mr. Beck's affair with Clara's neighbor; from the nightly SS drinking sessions in the room above to the small pleasure of a shared Christmas carp.

Against all odds, Clara lived to tell her story, and her diary is now part of the permanent col-lection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

For eighteen years I was a prisoner. I was an object for someone to use and abuse.

For eighteen years I was not allowed to speak my own name. I became a mother and was forced to be a sister. For eighteen years I survived an impossible situation.

On August 26, 2009, I took my name back. My name is Jaycee Lee Dugard. I don’t think of myself as a victim. I survived.

A Stolen Life is my story—in my own words, in my own way, exactly as I remember it.

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The pine cone is a symbol that represents the seed of a new beginning for me. To help facilitate new beginnings, with the support of animal-assisted therapy, the J A Y C Foundation provides support and services for the timely treatment of families recovering from abduction and the aftermath of traumatic experiences—families like my own who need to learn how to heal. In addition, the J A Y C Foundation hopes to facilitate awareness in schools about the important need to care for one another.

Our motto is “Just Ask Yourself to . . . Care!”

A portion of my proceeds from this memoir will be donated to The J A Y C Foundation Inc.

Her father was a wealthy Polish farmer. She has nearly completed all the steps to becoming a Catholic Nun when the Nazi’s came to Poland. Everyone in the convent was taken to Auschwitz.

This is her life story including what happened in the camps and afterwards on the long journey back home thru the Black Forest.