In AS A YOUNG GIRL OF THIRTEEN, Holocaust survivor Simone Lagrange recounts in detail her life before the war, her deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and her role in bringing Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie to justice.

AS A YOUNG GIRL OF 13 is an engaging portrait of a woman determined to never let her spirit be broken. As a schoolgirl, she threw an inkwell at a teacher who singled out the Jews in her classroom. At Auschwitz she squeezed ink out of the identification number tattooed on her arm. In an anteroom to the gas chambers, potentially moments from death, she refused to stand for a the camp commandant, so infuriating him that he slapped her and had her taken out of his sight—thereby saving her life.

In vivid detail, Lagrange describes the horror of the cattle cars transporting Jews to the death camp, and the "horror within horror" of life at Auschwitz, where her mother was killed for smuggling cabbage leaves to prisoners with scurvy. Her father would die after the camp had been abandoned, shot in the head moments after Simone recognized him in a line of prisoners.

Simone Lagrange's story echoes that of many Holocaust survivors. But what truly makes this documentary outstanding is her perceptiveness and the sharpness of her memory. Years after the war, Lagrange was one of the Holocaust survivors who recognized Klaus Barbie. AS A YOUNG GIRL OF THIRTEEN includes footage of her testimony at his trial, and a television appearance in which she says she has no doubt he is the same man who tortured her. Today, Lagrange says Barbie's sentence of life in prison was irrelevant—the true value of the trial was in telling the story of what happened to her and others during the Holocaust.

It is a story that she tells eloquently in this remarkable film.

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Select Accolades

• Audience Award, 21st Festival of History Films (Pessac, France)