One of those on the first registered Jewish transport to Auschwitz was a 17-year-old Polish girl named Rena Kornreich, who’d been working in Slovakia as a nanny. Two days after she arrived in Auschwitz (where she was the 716th female prisoner registered), her sister, Danka, did too.
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For the next three years and 41 days, Rena and Danka endured a host of dehumanizing horrors: starvation, beatings, forced labor, and the constant threat of death. Yet they persevered and survived—a remarkable triumph of love and compassion over intolerance and hate. Rena’s long life ended in 2006, more than 60 years after her liberation.
To learn more about this powerful story, and to share it on Holocaust Remembrance Day, National Geographic recently spoke with Heather Dune Macadam, co-author of Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz. First published in 1995, the memoir has just been reissued in a newly expanded edition.
One of our first conversations was on the phone, as I was making dinner. She asked what I was having, and I said pierogies. “Oh,” she said. “Are you Polish?” “No,” I said, “I just like them.” And she said that was a sign from God that I was meant to help her tell her story!
That was in 1992. We met every weekend and wrote the book in three months. It took awhile [to get her to relive her experiences]. She spent a long time trying not to talk about Auschwitz. But I just let her go, and eventually we got into it.
The original idea is that this would be personal—she wanted me to write down [her experience] for her children. But about halfway through I went, “Oh, my God!” This is an amazing story. This is a book.” And she said, “I know.”