IN 2019 I received an email from a family in Israel. It came from the son and daughter-in-law of one of three Jewish sisters who lived in the same town as Gita Fuhrmannova (the future wife of Lale Sokolov, whose story I told in my novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz).

They were on the same train to Auschwitz from eastern Slovakia in 1942 as Gita and lived in Block 29 at the concentration camp with Gita.

Days later, I flew to Israel and into the lives of the Meller sisters: Cibi, Magda and Livia, and the four generations of family they had created after surviving the horrors of the Holocaust. Two days before the start of the new year, I had a wonderful video chat with Livia, at 99 the youngest and sole remaining of the sisters.

Eighty years ago, Livia, Cibi and Magda had been in the Auschwitz/Birkenau concentration and death camp since early April 1942, surviving three years of unimaginable brutality.

With the war turning against the Nazis, they had endured weeks of hardship on the so-called “death marches”, as they were transferred from camp to camp by the retreating German forces.

Their freedom came when, together with several other young girls, they took a chance and fled from their captors during one of the forced marches.

The date of their escape was April 30, 1945. We know because of the bravery of Magda, the middle Meller sister, who had stolen a notebook and pen from one of the camps. The diary was found by her daughters after she died and after my novel had been published.

It’s an amazing document, written in real time, every day for two weeks by a young girl running from a death march. The original will end up at Yad Vashem – the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem – but I believe it deserves to be published in its own right.