Keeping a Promise: To Tell My Story of Survival in Warsaw during WWII

One day during World War II, as Marie Lubowski Winkelman took a walk with her boyfriend and his mother, they made a promise to each other that whoever survived would write about their experiences, if only to remember all those who died. Now, more than 65 years later, this book is the fulfillment of that promise. Except for her cousin Alina, who was a baby at the time, Marie is the only member of her family who survived the Holocaust. Her parents, brother, aunts and uncles, and other cousins were all killed. Keeping a Promise tells about Marie's childhood, the invasion of Poland by the German army, her time in the Warsaw ghetto and her life on the run from Nazi persecution. Moving from place to place for nearly three years, she convinced her hosts that she was a young Polish woman recovering from an operation. Along the way, she encountered many unusual people, some of them generous and kind, others selfish and cruel. But she never lost her faith in herself or her ability to survive, and her book is both a testament to her and family's spirit and to humanity's determination to survive.