Never Far Away: The Auschwitz Chronicles of Anna Heilman

Lisa Arsenault is an elementary-school teacher in Ajax, Ontario.

These are the wartime chronicles of Anna Heilman, a Polish Jew who was
in her early teens during the Second World War. During her internment in
concentration camps, she kept a diary but it did not survive the war.
Never Far Away is a compilation of a rewriting of the lost documents
directly after the war and memoirs written in Canada during the early
1990s.

The first third of the book describes Anna and her family’s life of
relative affluence in Warsaw. She was brought up in a very protected
environment, with a nanny, maids, private schooling, and summer-long
holidays in a resort town. The remainder of the book contrasts Anna’s
sheltered early life with her life in the Warsaw Ghetto and the Majdanek
and Auschwitz concentration camps. Anna’s parents were murdered at
Majdanek, her sister was tortured and hung at Auschwitz for her part in
an attempted uprising, and Anna herself endured life as a slave laborer.

The fact that Anna Heilman participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
and the attempted uprising at Auschwitz adds to the historical value of
this engrossing memoir.