Anna Heilman

obtained a degree in Social Work in Israel and lived in Boston before immigrating to Ottawa, Canada with her husband, Joshua, and their two daughters. Anna worked there with the bilingual Childr...

Never Far Away
The Auschwitz Chronicles of Anna Heilman

Anna Heilman

Anna Heilman was born into the comfort and security of an assimilated Jewish family in prewar Warsaw. Her happy life was shattered when German troops overran Poland in September 1939 and the Jewish people in Warsaw were gradually segregated into a "Jewish Quarter." Anna and her family were captured and taken from this ghetto and shipped first to Majdanek (where her parents were killed almost immediately), and then on to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Anna's sister was hanged by camp authorities in January 1945 for the role she played in blowing up one of Birkenau's crematoria in October of 1944. Never Far Away, provides a unique insight into the courage and ingenuity of the rebels who worked in an armament factory, and how they smuggled gunpowder back to their barracks to destroy the gas chambers.

The diary's entries reflect an immediacy and a self-conscious awareness of the enormity of what was happening. At the same time, they present the point of view of someone utterly and ultimately powerless to influence this larger course of events. Never Far Away documents the loss of childhood innocence and the triumph of human spirit against crushing oppression.

Never Far Away contains a foreword by historians Juergen Doerr and Dieter Buse and an afterword by Joel Prager.

University of Calgary Press