Marcelle (Malka) Bock: " If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem". Marcelle states that her survival was " dumb luck". My parents left Poland to settle in Paris, France, in 1930—the year before I was born. I was a breach delivery causing a right upper extremity palsy. My parents found it devastating to have a crippled child and sought much help. Finally, when I was seven years old, I was helped by a neurosurgeon, Dr. Bop. After the surgery, I was sent to recuperate in a sanitarium in Hendaye, a town bordering Spain. In 1939, my father, fearing he might be called into the army, came to visit me in Hendaye. I begged him to bring me home to my mother and twin sisters. Unable to refuse my request, we returned to Paris. And so it was that our family was together when the Germans invaded Paris in 1940. The immediate family stayed intact until July 1942, when my mother, sisters, and I were arrested in a huge raid and were taken to a stadium called the Velodrome d’Hiver in Paris. There, we met a volunteer nurse we knew who arranged for me to be taken to Rothschild Hospital, where I was held prisoner for a time. I eventually escaped from there, although I have no memory of it. While my father was in hiding in Paris, I was hidden in two separate locations outside Paris. I remember an episode when I defied my father’s advice to go back into hiding when I was sick with appendicitis. Instead, I found a surgeon whom I had known to help me. My father survived to almost the end of the war. On June 1, 1944, I learned that he had been arrested. When I tried to visit him on June 8,1944, to celebrate the Allied invasion, I learned that he had not survived. Neither did my mother and sisters. After the war, I spent a year with my Aunt Jenny and cousin Bernard. Aunt Jenny’s husband also had been killed in Auschwitz. Then I came to live in America with the help of a great uncle who owned a hotel in the Catskills. When the summer season was over, we took a small apartment in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn. In December 1946, I met my Leonard. We were married a year later, when I was just sixteen and he was twenty, and we have had a good life together. We have two married daughters and three grandsons. Marcelle now has severe pulmonary disease, from a history of heavy smoking, and scoliosis, and she requires portable oxygen. Dr. Siegel painted the oxygen tubing. She was recently hospitalized and is recovering. She loves to paint using acrylics and signs her paintings with “Malka". Her painting of her twin sisters, who perished in Auschwitz, is in the background of the portrait, as is a poem she has written, which can also be found on the Internet.