Marianne Lavan was born in Bystřice near Český Těšín on September 12, 1929, the youngest of three sisters. Her mother ran a pharmacy in Bystřice.
After the German occupation, Marianne was moved with other Jewish families to the local ghetto and was put to forced labour in the munitions factory. She was then deported to the Sosnowitz concentration camp, from where she was further deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. She survived selection and was further deported to the camps Bolkenhain, Merzdorf, Grünberg in Schlesien and Christianstadt. She escaped from the camp and hid until the end of the war with the help of local people in the then German town of Sorau, now Żary in Poland.
After the liberation, she returned to Czechoslovakia, where she discovered that none of her large family had survived. She tried to start a new life in Prague and married. Eventually she and her husband decided to leave Europe and moved to Australia. There she had two children. At the time of filming, Marianne had four grandchildren.
The interview was recorded on August 24, 1995, in Rose Bay, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.