“I went to Auschwitz in 1942. First I worked in the fields. That was very hard. I would have died if I’d continued doing that, I think. And the work ruined my hands. I went to Canada in 1943. Of course it wasn’t a holiday camp. Things still happened. Bad things. I was raped three times by SS men while I was there.” She shrugged it off. “The first time was the worst. He beat me afterward. Out of guilt I suppose. But he could just as easily have killed me, which sometimes happened out of fear that the girl would tell someone. The second and third time I didn’t resist, so I don’t know that you could call it rape, really. I didn’t want it. But I didn’t want to get hurt, either. The third time I even tried to enjoy it, which was a mistake. Because when they opened the camp brothel later that year, someone remembered that and I was transferred to work there, as a prostitute.

“No one called it a brothel, mind. And we certainly didn’t think of ourselves as prostitutes, at the time. We were just doing our job, which was to stay alive. It was just Block Twenty-four and we were treated comparatively well. We had clean clothes, showers, exercise, and access to medical attention. We even had perfume. I can’t tell you what that was like. To smell nice again. After smelling of sweat, and worse, for a whole year. The men we had sex with weren’t SS. They weren’t allowed. Some of them risked it. But most restricted themselves to looking through the spy holes in the doors while we were doing it. I made a regular friend in the Auschwitz fire brigade. A Czech man, who treated me very kindly. One hot day, he even sneaked me into the fire-brigade swimming pool. I didn’t wear a costume. I remember how nice it felt to feel the sun on my naked body. And how kind all the men were. How they treated me like an object of veneration and worship. It seemed like the happiest day of my life. He was a Catholic and we went through a sort of secret marriage ceremony that was conducted by a priest.