Rena Gerlin was a writer and a painter, born in Poland in the happy Interwar period. She miraculously survived the Holocaust horror and settled in Western Europe after the Liberation. As a mother of 2 sons and grandmother of 3, she would always show enthusiasm and faith in the future. Despite a cruelly stolen youth, her art usually shows a quiet optimistic vision of the world. Besides the bare cruelty of facts, her memoir transmits a message of hope to the next generations, useful reminder of the lessons of the past.