A Teenage Girl in Auschwitz Basha Freilich and the Will to Live

The true story of a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl is torn from her home and family and thrust into one of history's greatest atrocities, the concentration camp of Auschwitz.

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.

Douglas Wellman is a former Hollywood television producer-director, and assistant dean of the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. For over forty years he has been a historian and researcher of the 20th Century, particularly World Wars I and II. His primary interest is exploring and relating the lives of people caught in conflict. He also currently works a few days a week as a hospital chaplain.