Diane von Furstenberg Read Online Free

pictures of 25,000 other deported Belgians, shows a lovely young woman with light, wavy hair dressed in a fitted coat and scarf. Throughout her life, the first thing people noticed about Lily was her smile, dazzlingly warm and bright. In almost every picture that survives of her she is smiling. Not in this one.
    On the journey to Auschwitz, Lily attached herself to a motherly older woman. She clutched the woman’s hand as the cattle car lumbered to a halt on May 19, and the prisoners scrambled to the ground. When the Nazi in charge directed the older woman to join a group on the left, Lily followed, and the guard allowed it. But a higher-ranking Nazi standing by in a white coat, whom Lily came to believe was Josef Mengele, ordered her into the group on the right. He saved her life—the 108 Jews in the group on the left were immediately gassed.
    In the barracks, Lily overheard anguished voices. “Do you smell the crematorium? We’re all going to die!” She covered her ears, refusing to descend to the pit of despair. She thought of her parents and Leon and felt the power of their love and prayers.
    At Auschwitz she worked in a bullet factory and recalled later that shemade the bullets badly so they’d malfunction. Lily had been at the camp eight months when, on January 17, 1945, as the Allied armies closed in, the SS command in Berlin sent orders to Auschwitz to execute all prisoners. In the chaos of the German retreat, however, the order was not honored, and the Nazis began moving prisoners out. At the end of a long, frigid march in the snow, Lily ended up at Ravensbrück, a woman’s camp fifty-six miles north of Berlin. From there, she was sent to one of its satellites, Neustadt-Glewe which was described by one prisoner as “the worst of the worst of the worst,” with unimaginably sordid barracks, so crowded there was no room to lie down at night, and walls black with lice. In the two and a half months that Lily was there, from February 18 to May 8 an average of seventy prisoners a week died from starvation or illness; others were sent back to Ravensbrück to be gassed. One survivor described the piled bodies as “a huge mountain of corpses two meters tall.”
    Lily awoke from a fitful sleep on May 5 to find the German guards gone, while a group of men—who, from their rags and ravaged physiques, appeared to be former prisoners—worked with tools on the electrified fence surrounding the camp. Suddenly, the gates opened, and Lily and her fellow prisoners were free. Wandering the countryside, she was picked up by a group of US soldiers patrolling the area. She was hospitalized for a week at an American base. When she was well enough to travel, the Americans sent her home.
    Thanks to her mother’s ministrations, which included feeding her bits of food every few minutes, Lily quickly gained back some of the flesh she’d lost as a prisoner. In a picture taken on her wedding day in November 1945, a month after being reunited with Leon, she looks thin but mostly restored to the stylish, brown-eyed beauty she’d been before the war. The wedding was like a dream, the town hall filled with friends and flowers, the bride and groom standing in front of the justice of the peace. At that moment, all they desired was to be together. Like many couples who married in the wake of the Holocaust, Lily and Leon were united by their powerful sense of renewed life. As it turned out, though, thiswould not be enough to sustain them, and eventually they’d be wrenched apart by the stronger force of the horror they’d endured. They would stay married for sixteen years, but it would be a troubled union, scarred by wounds that wouldn’t heal.
    THE LIFE THAT LILY AND Leon embarked on with baby Diane was both a denial of and a rebuke to the war. Leon started his own business dealing in electronic tubing, which at that time was a vital component of most electronic devices from radios and TVs to radar systems. He didn’t diversify; he