“Ida Frank Kilstein grew up with four siblings in the Polish town of Oswieciem, which would later become notorious as Auschwitz: the Nazi slave labor camp and mass killing site established in May of 1940. After the Nazis invaded Poland, the Frank family was forced into a ghetto in a nearby town. They were gradually dispersed. Ida was put to work in factories and moved from place to place. A final march away from the advancing Allied forces took her far into the heart of Germany, to Bergen-Belsen, where she and other prisoners were liberated in April 1945. Ida and one brother were all who survived of her family.”

-Ida Kilstein