In April 1944, during Passover, Irene and her family were forced into the Munkács ghetto and soon after deceived into boarding a “work train” bound for Auschwitz. On the way and upon arrival, she recognized familiar faces among the guards—people she had once known—now standing behind the shouts and the guns.

At Auschwitz she was separated from her parents and siblings, becoming the sole survivor among forty relatives. Before selection, her mother had hidden four tiny diamonds in the hem of her skirt—“for bread if you ever escape.” Irene kept them by swallowing and recovering them again and again, carrying a small promise through an unthinkable place.

In the camp she was subjected to repeated experiments by Dr. Josef Mengele—painful injections into her eyes, beneath her fingernails, and later a procedure to remove her tattooed number, part of an effort to learn how to erase that ink. The wounds never fully healed.

Near the end of the war, Irene escaped during a death march and was found by American soldiers. Two years later she immigrated to the United States, married, and—despite the experiments meant to deny her that future—had two children.

In time she chose to speak publicly, appearing in the Academy Award–winning documentary produced by Steven Spielberg and sharing her story so that the next generation would remember not only the statistics, but the faces, the choices, and the courage that shaped a single life.