More than half of my life has been spent in Melbourne. Here, my three children grew up, married and had families of their own. Here, my husband - may he rest in peace - and I, rebuilt our shattered lives and lived together for over twenty-five years. In this flat, his spirit still remains and often, he visits me in dreams, for although his body succumbed, his love has not. Nor has mine. After all these years, our home is still as he would remember it and serves as a physical link between us.

So you see, although I live alone, I am certainly not lonely. Apart from my children and grandchildren, I am blessed with very good friends with whom I have shared not only a social relationship but also an active community involvement. Indeed, far from being weighed down with idle time, my problem is finding time to do all the things that are so important to me.

At an age when many of those fortunate enough to attain it are content to contemplate the past whilst awaiting the future, I am still very much immersed in the present. I consider the ability to do this, a gift directly from God.

Yet, I still remember those turbulent times, half a world and half a lifetime removed from my current comfortable existence. I remember that world, peopled by martyrs and those who murdered them, or abetted the process actively or tacitly by their silence.

The perennial question, 'Why was I spared?' remains unanswered. Perhaps I will still learn the reason in my lifetime, or perhaps several more generations must pass before it is resolved. I can only say that I am proud to be a small part of the rebirth of the Jewish people and the Jewish State. My bond with Israel has always been strong. Not only have I visited there more than once but have relatives including a grandson and 2 great-grandsons numbered among its citizens.

After being a part of the human flotsam tossed around Eastern Europe by a tide of events beyond comprehension, I never imagined that I would survive. Certainly, I would not have foreseen, fifty years ago, while living in a frozen land with two children and a husband whose whereabouts was unknown, that my future would be in this faraway land.

I wish with all my heart that my children's children, and their children, to the end of time, should be spared the horrors endured by my generation. However, it is important that they know and understand that this happened to real people, even to their own flesh and blood. The knowledge of the Holocaust with its personal impact must be passed on or else time and distance will sanitise it. Should this happen, it would be a betrayal of our six million dead.

Although so many books about the Holocaust have already been published, I believe that everyone who survived has a story to tell, and the time for telling is growing short.

These memoirs are chiefly for my own family, those who luckily did not experience the Shoah or were too young to remember. I want them to know what it was like to be an ordinary person caught in the inferno of those times.