Feature: Holocaust survivor's tragedy ends up with triumph

It is a story full of tears and tragedy, but ends up with triumph.

Gizelle Cycowycz, a clinical psychologist, is a Holocaust survivor who treats other survivors and continues to tell her story for 70 years with the Nazi camp.

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1927, Cycowycz lived with her parents and two sisters in a beautiful home as she describes it.

Her father had successful businesses and they led a comfortable life, until the reality of Nazi Germany confronted them.

She clearly remembers the day her "religious" father shaved his beard. He did not want a Nazi soldier to force him to do so, so he did it himself.

"Somebody is coming towards me and I don't know who the person is and then he comes closer and I recognize that this is my father. He was so embarrassed, so humiliated, having to do this."

Before being sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp in Poland, she had been in a Ghetto not far from her hometown.

Cycowycz's parents had sent her two older sisters to Hungary in an attempt to save them. She was too young to be sent away and remained with her parents.

The family was reunited for a short time on the train on the way to the infamous camp -- a camp where over a million Jews were killed, most of them gassed to death.

"Tens of Jews huddled in small trains with two buckets, one was used as a toilet and one for water," she described to Xinhua. "There were passengers who died on the way, there were women who gave birth, and people were sick and hungry. And they all knew they were going to an awful place."

It was there, in the crowded and smelly train, as her family was huddled together whispering, where Cycowycz was to receive a final piece of advice from her father:

"Just work, volunteer for every kind of work that they ask you to do. Say you know how to do it. That will save you."

Cycowycz and her sisters worked in a factory an hour walk from the camp until it was liberated.

But, their father was not so lucky. He was taken immediately from the train with the other healthy men to work at a coal mine.

Later, Cycowycz and her family heard from witnesses that the father had worked until a day before the camp was liberated and apparently was with the last group of men who was gassed to death hours before coalition forces arrived.

She had only learned about her father's death months after it had happened. She recalls there were no tears and no sadness.

"We were not crying. I look at my sisters. So we heard a fact and I was thinking I was ashamed I hear about my father's death and I don't cry. Why don't we cry? There is no one to say 'I'm so sorry you went through this,' there was no one left to console."

But as the anticipated liberation of the camp happened, Cycowycz and others greeted it with silence and shock. There was no jubilation as they were set free.

After the World War II, Cycowycz and her family arrived in the United States where she married and had three children and only then she resumed her studies which were halted abruptly at the age of 12 when Jews were no longer allowed to attend schools in Czechoslovakia.

She became a clinical psychologist. When her husband died, she immigrated to Israel where her children and grandchildren were already living.

Today, Cycowycz has 21 grandchildren and seven grandchildren.

In Israel, she began treating Holocaust survivors, a job she finds greatly satisfying.

In addition to the therapy Cycowycz gives to survivors, she frequently speaks to groups of students and soldiers and officers in the Israeli military.

She sometimes accompanies such groups on trips to the concentration camps.

She describes one time when she escorted a group of officers from the Israeli army:

"That was a very very strong experience for me because these guys who are not babies, who went through wars and lost friends in the wars and siblings, they were so tearful and emotional as the young kids who I take."

She has triumphed over tragedy and fulfilled her father's wish of living in Israel. Endit