Rena's promise

On March 26, 1942, the first mass registered transport of Jews arrived in Auschwitz--all young women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two. Among those nine hundred and ninety-seven young Jewish women was #1716, Rena Kornreich, a Pole hiding in Slovakia. A few days later, her sister Danka #2779 arrived and so began a trial of love and courage that would last three years and forty-one days, from the beginning of the Auschwitz death camp, to the death march, and on to the end of the war. Rena's Promise stands out from other Holocaust memoirs not only in the length of time she spent in the camps, but in the spirit of love she maintains throughout her ordeal. No other survivor from the first transport has ever written about her experience (too few survived) when the women's camp was part of the men's camp, and the only men were Polish and Russian POWs. Within a few days that would all change.