Annick Lever was seven years old when she stepped between the woman she thought was her mother, Mimi, and Mimi's husband, who had come home drunk and threatened to kill her. Placing herself between the warring couple, Annick tried to pull them apart. But when she did so, her father pushed her aside and said something that shattered the foundation of her childhood: 'She's not your mother.
Annick, who had been raised in a French Catholic household by Mimi and her husband, with fleeting visits from her father Pierre, had no previous indication that her story wasn't quite what it seemed. In fact, Annick was born in the south of France in November to a Jewish mother, who had been taken to a Nazi prison in France before being shipped off Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp when Annick was just two years old.
Annick herself was imprisoned with her mother and maternal grandparents before being smuggled out of the jail, at which point she went to live with.
Her father Pierre met Liliane, from Paris, in the summer of when she was visiting the South of France with her sister and parents. After the war broke out in September, Liliane and her family did not go back to Paris and remained with Pierre. Life became increasingly difficult for French Jews after Germany invaded in and Annick's family were forced to register, declare all their possessions and, from , wear the yellow Star of David on their clothes.
Their identification papers were stamped with the word 'Jew' and a curfew was imposed, preventing them from leaving their homes in the evening. Pierre, who was well respected in the community as a cattle dealer and a member of the French Resistance, was able to provide for the family using the black market. Yet life changed dramatically when, at the start of , the family arrived home from a day out with Mimi and her husband to find the police waiting for them.
