'It's not normal that we survived': Toronto Holocaust survivor was one of Auschwitz's first prisoners

At 95-years-old, Edith Grosman still wrestles with survivor's guilt every day.

The faded tattoo of her prisoner number, 1970, is a painful reminder of what she survived and lost during the Holocaust. Monday marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the infamous concentration camp.

Grosman was 17 when she, her older sister Lea, and nearly a thousand other young Jewish women from Slovakia became the first prisoners of Auschwitz. Many of them, including Lea, never came home.

"It's not normal that we survived, she said. "I think there was a higher force that was pushing us to live."

The women's stories are told in a new book called 999: The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Jewish Transport to Auschwitz. 

Watch: Edith Grosman explains what life was like in one of humanity's worst horrors

'It's not normal that we survived': Holocaust survivor recalls horrors of Auschwitz

5 years ago

Duration 4:56

Edith Grosman recalls her memories of Auschwitz

Video producers: Sannah Choi and Paul Borkwood
Videographers: Paul Borkwood