WINNIPEG — Child Holocaust survivor Nelli Rotbart says that while it took her only two weeks to write her Holocaust memoir, Out of the Fire, on paper,  she has been writing it in her mind for 40 years.

Rotbart was eight years old when the war started, and as with most survivors, she ultimately lost most of her immediate family. On Sept. 15, 1943, Rotbart, her parents and her older sisters, Sima and Eva, were ambushed in the woods where they were hiding in Poland. Nelli and Eva survived. The other family members were murdered.

The first 30 pages of her book are about her life in rural Poland in the 1930s and her memories of family and friends and neighbours. Her life was like that of any child who is a member of a loving family. Her father operated a store and was a cattle buyer. Her mother brought in additional income as a seamstress. Rotbart says she was a somewhat mischievous child with a passion for reading.

On Sept. 1, 1939, when the first German bombs fell on her village, everything changed. “It was the beginning of the end,” she writes.

The next 70 pages recount her life on the run from the Nazis.

She observes that the signs were there before the war started, as many people had passed through the family’s village over the summer months, fleeing east in anticipation of what was to come. She recounts the well-known restrictions against Jews. Her father lost his business. She and her sisters couldn’t attend school. They had to have a large Magen David on the front of their house and wear the yellow star. There was frequent Nazi harassment.

The family was deported to a ghetto in 1941. They escaped from the ghetto, only to end up in another, They escaped again in 1942 and found temporary shelter with a sympathetic Polish farmer.

In the spring of 1943, the family was on the run again until they were found out and attacked in the woods. Eva and Nelli separated shortly after that and Nelli eventually found shelter with a Polish family where she pretended to be a Polish Christian girl.

The rest of Out of the Fire tells of her years living in the Soviet Union after the war.

“I was 14 when the war ended,” she recalls. “I heard that there was going to be a transport to Russia leaving from Lublin. “I was romantic and naïve. I wanted to get out of Poland. I wanted an education. I thought that Russia was a country where there was no discrimination and everyone was equal.”

It was only later that she realized her mistake.

On arrival in the Soviet Union, she says, she was placed in an orphanage for foreigners operated in Kiev by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police that was a forerunner of the KGB.

 “The director was a nice lady who found me work in a factory,” Rotbart recalls.

Over the next eight years, she was able to finish school and get training as a librarian. Her first posting as a librarian was in a village called Nikolajev on the Dneister River in Ukraine. After a year there, she was able to find work at a library in Odessa.

In Odessa, she married Aron Kaptsan, an engineer and chess player. (They divorced after they came to Canada in the early 1990s.)

Shortly afterward, Kaptsan found a position in Liepaja, Latvia, and Rotbart found work in a naval library. The couple had one daughter, Sima.

“In 1972, after the Helsinki Accords made it possible for Jews to leave Russia, my sister, Eva, who was living in Winnipeg, sent us an invitation to come here,” Rotbart says.

“At that time, my husband didn’t want to leave. When we finally agreed to apply to leave in 1979, the Afghanistan war was underway and the doors were closed.”

Rotbart and her husband became Refuseniks, Soviet citizens who were denied permission to emigrate, and they were immediately dismissed from their jobs. “We were refused permission to leave five times,” she recalls. “Finally, in 1982, they let us go.”

Rotbart originally finished her manuscript seven or eight years ago and tried shopping it around to various publishers without success.

“I gave up trying to get it published,” she says. “I did sent a copy though to Concordia University, whose Judaic studies department was collecting memoirs of Holocaust survivors in Canada. The university put my memoirs on the Internet. People from my home village in Poland read my story and contacted my son-in-law by e-mail. They sent pictures of the village and we have kept in touch.”

Rotbart eventually decided to self-publish after receiving encouragement from Carla Divinsky of the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada. She had close to 300 copies printed, half of which she has given away to friends and relatives, schools and universities. She has some copies for sale in local Winnipeg bookstores as well as in Chapters in Toronto.

Also included in her book is a poem, The Doomed, which she composed when she was 13 and in hiding in the fields on a scorching hot June day in 1943. While she had long forgotten the poem, she found when she came to Canada that her sister, Eva, had memorized it. The poem is now also on display at Yad Vashem.