I will have nightmares again tonight. And probably tomorrow night and the next night. The hate-filled faces will appear. I will be a helpless child fighting an enormous, terrifying enemy. I will awake in a panic only to find myself far away from those memories--the screams, the flames, the fear. Safe, I will tell myself. Hate can still find me. I feel it at work all around me.

Haunted and inspired by her promise to a friend in a concentration camp fifty years ago, Cato Jaramillo tells her unique and disturbing story. A non-Jew growing up in Amsterdam, Cato was kidnapped at a Hitler Youth party, put in an overcrowded boat with children dying all around her, and taken to the brutal concentration camp at Nordhausen.
At last, the story she has shared with educators and students for years is in print. She portrays a childhood so difficult that she almost felt prepared for the horrifying conditions of a concentration camp. Cato's childhood was stolen; she was an unwanted baby, abused by an alcoholic father, and became a teenager behind the barbed wire fences of Nordhausen, where for nearly two years she was forced at gunpoint to do whatever the Nazi gaurds demanded.

Cato and Dr. Blaine Passey, who was a member of the medical unit that evacuated prisoners at Nordhausen in April 1945.

The same defience that preserved her life now drives Cato to confront members of gangs and other at-risk youth about the destructive consequences of their hatred. She sees hatred as an acid that cannot be contained and also asserts that memories of pain do not excuse us from becoming strong and loving human beings. Horrible memories do not have to rule you--they can serve you, keep you from creating the same memories for another human being, forge in you a heart so kind that you cry out in defense of the helpless and harmless.
At once unsettling, heartrending, and absorbing, here is a passionate story full of life, mishief, and raw honesty.