Zezette Larsen was born on February 21, 1929 in Brussels,
Belgium. Zezette enjoyed being close to her assimilated, French-
speaking Jewish grandparents in pre-World War II Belgium as well
as spending school vacations with her Dutch grandparents in
Amsterdam, Holland. Like so many European Jews, Zezette's family
was ill-prepared for the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust. With the
help of the Belgian Underground, however, she and her brother
Marcel were initially hidden in Catholic institutions. When her
parents went into hiding, Zezette, at the age of 12, was taken
to a Catholic convent and boarding school in Overies, Belgium,
under the pseudonym "Marguerite Michaels." She found it very
difficult to adjust to her new identity and was tormented by
living a life of deceit. Suffering extreme homesickness, she
went to visit her parents in hiding during the Easter holidays.
Together with her mother and father she was captured on Easter
Sunday 1943 and deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination
camp three weeks lat