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While teenagers in other parts of the world were going to school and making friends, Clara Kramer was hiding under a house in Zolkiew, Poland. The 15-year-old spent two years hiding with 17 other Jews under the house of a known anti-Semite and his compassionate wife, a couple Kramer affectionately refers to as "our saviors."

"Clara's War: One Girl's Story Of Survival," Kramer's diary that she kept in that bumker, was released in England last year and is slotted for release in Poland, Germany, Norway, Spain, India, China, and the United States April 21. Her diary is being published on Holocaust Remembrance Day, a time Kramer says was deliberately chosen because of its significance.

"I don't want the world to forget what happened to us," Kramer said.

Kramer currently resides in Elizabeth, where she has served as president of the Holocaust Resource Foundation at Kean University for the past 25 years.

"When the first book came up denying the Holocaust, a group of survivors in Elizabeth went to the rabbi in Elizabeth," she told The Jewish State. "He said that if you teach teachers, you will be assured you won't be forgotten, because another generation will learn. So we created that Holocaust center of Kean University."

Her job as the president of the holocaust center is to take teachers to the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., tell them her story on the drive down, and take them to the Wall of the Righteous and show them the names of the people who saved her family. Upon returning to New Jersey, Kramer makes appointments with these teachers and sits in on their Holocaust classes.

"[Kean is] the only one that has a Holocaust center that trains teachers to teach the Holocaust," Kramer said. "We trained well over 1,000 teachers already."

Kramer originally donated her diary to the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., almost 30 years ago. She wrote a copy in English and donated that as well. She never intended to publish the diary, but made copies for family and friends upon request. That all changed two years ago, when an assistant to a French filmmaker read Kramer's diary and selected it to appear in a movie. However, when the director read the diary, she believed her story of survival was more fitting for a book than a movie.

"The rest is history!" Kramer said.

For two years, Kramer barely walked, talked, ate, or drank. Because of severe food shortages, she said that it was difficult for the couple to bring enough water for 20 people into the house without looking suspicious.

"We were in a crawlspace. Not a cellar, but a crawlspace," Kramer said. "There was no floor, just dirt, and we had straw pallets. That's how we sat all day. At night, we were lying down. For two years, I didn't have a drink of water, except when I helped clean the house," Kramer said.

Those rare trips out of the crawlspace were relieving for Kramer, but they had to stop a few months before the war ended when Nazis quartered themselves in the house they were hiding under.

"For the last few months, we had Germans living over our heads in the apartment," Kramer said. "There was a trap door [to the crawlspace] in the couple's bedroom. It wasn't easy to get to the trap door, but if it wasn't in their bedroom (where the Nazis did not stay), I wouldn't be talking to you."

Kramer said that with the Nazis above their heads, the last few months in the crawlspace were spent living in more intense fear than the previous months.

"You are always scared," Kramer said. "We had an electric light, and we read newspapers, and we knew what was going on in the war, and we prayed."

Kramer and the other hidden Jewish people in the cellar heard Nazis taking Jews out from the city's ghetto and executing them as the war came to an end.

"At the beginning, the used to load [Jews] into cattle cars," Kramer said. "In 1944, they didn't bother anymore with that. Beginning with 1945, they just took the Jews from the ghettos outside the cities and they had to dig big ditches, had to run through the ditches, and they were machine gunned. A lot of them fell in [the pit] alive. We were lying down there and we'd hear it. At 4 a.m., we heard footsteps, cries, Germans screaming, and we knew they could take our family to be killed."

When Kramer and her family were allowed out of the cellar when the war ended in May 1945, they needed to re-learn how to walk and talk.

"I had to learn how to walk," Kramer said. "If you don't walk for two years, you don't know how to walk. You don't stand up. The soles of your feet don't hold you. For a long, long time, I only whispered because I forgot that I could speak loud. You whispered, and only when you had to say something. We were 18 people; if everybody says one word, there is noise. So you didn't."

By the end of the war, her town's Jewish population was zero. The only Jews left, Kramer said, were in "that mass grave in the forest." Even the regular cemetery had been destroyed and is currently a marketplace. The only Jewish cemetery left, according to Kramer, is in Warsaw, which Hitler left intact because of the fear that officials may catch on to what he was doing to the Jews if they saw the destroyed cemetery.

"Our regular cemetery, which dated back to the 1500s, was destroyed when the Germans came," Kramer said. "They didn't destroy the cemeteries in Germany, because to Hitler, Polish people and the Slavs were also second-class citizens and they didn't care what they thought about [the Nazis]."

Once the war ended, Kramer was transferred to a displaced persons camp in Germany. Afterwards, she lived in Israel for eight years, then moved to America to be with family.

"I wish the Jews were more interested," Kramer said. "When I speak to young people and I tell them that I was in this place, and that I was in the DP camp with three or four families to one room, there was no Israel and America had a quota. The State Department was very anti-Semitic in the 1940s. It's a whole chapter I wish the Jewish children learned because it shows how important Israel is. To me, I want to make sure Israel is strong, because if there was an Israel in the early 40s, there would [have been] no Holocaust."