Seventy years after the fact, the Holocaust continues to challenge us. No matter how many books are written, movies produced, or oral histories collected, the sweeping scale and sheer malevolence of the Final Solution elude our grasp. Though we struggle to conceive of the systematic imprisonment and execution of millions, we glimpse the true enormity of the Holocaust when we see how mass slaughter and deprivation played out in individuals’ day-to-day lives.

We Got the Water is the story of the Klein family: Herman and Bertha, and their three children, Lilly, Oli and sixteen-year-old Gabi. In the spring and summer of 1944, along with more than 400,000 other Hungarian Jews, they were forced from their homes, rounded up, and sent to Auschwitz. The Kleins were aboard one of the very first trains of this mass deportation. Author Jill Gabrielle Klein follows her father, his sisters and their mother through Auschwitz and into slave labor camps in Poland and Germany, providing a narrative—both harrowing and inspirational—of resilience in the face of terror.

Based on extensive interviews with the three sibling survivors, We Got the Water is also told through the sisters’ own writings, composed in the midst of their ordeal: both Lilly and Oli managed to keep diaries while they were imprisoned. These remarkable historical documents paint a vivid picture of the horrors and suffering—as well as the small kindnesses and camaraderie—that defined life in the camps. Lilly’s diaries are on display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

As it charts the author’s personal quest to reconstruct the past, the book also documents the inexorable disappearance of living Holocaust survivors, whose first-person accounts illuminate this dark period and inscribe it in our collective memory.

Professor Jill Klein, Ph.D. is a social psychologist who is on the faculty of Melbourne Business School at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She and her father speak internationally to audiences on the topic of resilience.