A Teenage Girl in Auschwitz

Basha Freilich and the Will to Live

In January of 1943, fourteen-year-old Basha Anush and her family were dragged from their home in Pruzhany, Poland by Nazi troops and shipped off to the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp.

Within days, five members of her family would be dead and she would be subjected to two-and-a-half years of abuse, a death march into Germany, and months of roaming with other homeless girls when the Third Reich collapsed.

Despite it all, she honored a last-minute promise given to her mother: she would survive to tell the story. With supreme inner strength and courage, she lived to start a new life in the United States, raise a family, and claim a piece of the American Dream.

The nightmare of the Holocaust never fully left her, but she triumphed in spite of it.

©2023 Douglas Wellman (P)2026 Douglas Wellman