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Warm thanks are due to Olly Ritterband for giving Scandinavia SIG permission to republish her book:
"Will to Survive"
Olly Ritterband - who is both an author and an artist - has written her recollections about a childhood and youth in Transylvania, about the deportation to Auschwitz, the rescue to Sweden, and her life since then as a wife, mother and renowned artist and Denmark.
It is a most touching and soul-stirring tale told by a remarkable woman with warmth and subdued humor.
All the illustrations on the front page and throughout the book are all her works.
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Olly Ritterband was born in Rumania - in Miercurea-Niraj, in the part of the country known as Transylvania.
Her parents were Jews.
After a childhood in sheltered, loving surroundings, came the fateful year - 1944 - when Olly and her parents were sent by the Nazis to concentration camps.
This book portrays - as individual fates hewn like bricks for a mosaic - the fate that befell the Czitron family, with Olly as the narrator.
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Why has she decided to write this book?
People have said so many times that the atrocities will never be repeated. No more concentration camps, no more gas chambers, no more human degradation. Never again. Never.
But history shows that this is simply not true.
Every day, somewhere in the world, things are happening that call to mind the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. Truth may be brutal, but it can teach us a lesson.
Please note: Most of the photos and illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them!
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Part I: Before it all began...