The camp is getting fuller and fuller. I talk to the Sanitater – an SS guard, who collects the sick from all the other camps and brings them here – and he tells me that when there are over a thousand inmates, they are sent away. And I see that the camp is filling up and filling up and filling up. So I decided – I am not going away with them to Auschwitz. I have to get out of here

My mother was a Holocaust survivor. She embodied the Holocaust. She experienced it physically, lived it emotionally and studied it intellectually. She spent her entire life trying to make logical sense of an inexplicable trauma that ruled her life and decimated her past.
But being a Survivor was never all of who she was. She was so much more – somebody truly special who survived and enriched people’s lives not because of the Holocaust, but despite it.
Filled with the many stories of love, loss, hope, friendship, and food, told and retold – some by her, and some about her – this book creates a composite of the warm, intelligent, and amazing person that she was.
These are her stories.

Rochy Miller is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor – Lea Leibowitz. Not Just a Survivor – a portrait of my mother is her mother’s story. This memoir has been a lifetime in the making.

Rochy is a retired medical doctor, who, like her mother, holds a swathe of other qualifications, and dabbles a little in each! She has studied creative writing, and holds both Medical Journalism and Master of Journalism degrees. She has published numerous short stories and articles, as well as a series of Text Books in the field of aesthetics education. Originally from South Africa, she now lives in Brisbane, Australia, with her husband.