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As time begins to swallow the survivors of World War II, a new memoir, "GRIT: A Pediatrician's Odyssey From a Soviet Camp to Harvard," tells the tale of a young girl's coming of age interwoven with the struggles, hardship, and horrors of the war and her lonely immigration to the United States.

Dr. Regina Kesler was living in Paramus as she fought a five-year battle with breast cancer, writing her memoir even through her deteriorating health. Kesler would not outlive her cancer, and her memoir-writing came to an untimely end, but, after retiring, devoted husband Michael Kesler took up her project and worked with the help of professors and writers to produce and publish Regina's story.

The memoir follows young Kesler, then the 14-year-old Regina Chanowicz, on her journey. Before readers reach chapter two, Kesler has moved from Suwalki, Poland, to Olita, Lithuania, and finally to communist Vilna.

Vilna was a place of turmoil, due to the erupting political tension between Stalin and Hitler and the epidemic of dysentery and typhoid fever, and Kesler and her family soon moved from Vilna, accused of spying for Germans by the Soviets, who sent her, her parents, and her little brother Jacob to Siberia, leaving behind her younger sister Barbara, who was away when the family was seized.

The Chanowicz family was sent to a Soviet labor camp in Siberia, where Kesler would endure being separated from her father; long, hard work; little food; sexual assault; and the deadly Siberian winter. Yet, with changing politics between Polish leadership and Stalin, Kesler, her mother, and her brother were set free from the camp and escaped to Osh, Kyrgyzstan, where Kesler would stay until Germany's surrender in 1945. While in Osh, Kesler experiences more Soviet culture, dips into the traditions of her Uzbek friends, reunites with her father, finishes high school, and begins her medical career as an assistant nurse.

Kesler's words on Soviet culture are chilling. "A state of terror existed in which nobody felt safe," she writes. "People feared and distrusted one another. Sudden jailing and disappearances of neighbors reinforced a state of paranoia." She describes Soviet patriotism in a way reminiscent of Orwell's 1984. "I often wondered how so many children grew up successfully without a male figure in their midst," she muses, for men were served on the front. "One day, I understood: they had Stalin, the big father figure." She relates winning a medal for swimming: "The medal meant, 'Daddy is with you all the time.'"

Kesler attended the Teachers' Institute for nursing while working at the hospital. Studying during wartime offered unique experiences. She writes, "My Teacher's Institute provided training to give emergency relief behind battle lines. This exciting experience included learning to parachute and carry food supplies and medical aid to the wounded."

However, Kesler's passion for medicine extended beyond the institute, and she was soon accepted to Moscow Medical School, where she shortly studied to become a doctor before returning to her family and transferring back to the Teacher's Institute in Osh.

Eventually, the Chanowiczs moved back to Suwalki, where they were able to regain their lost family member, little Barbara, who had grown into a woman. Yet their old town was ruined by the war due to the Nazi occupation, which used their synagogue as a stable and destroyed the vitality of Suwalki. "My hometown and everything that had been dear and close to me since my childhood had vanished," Kesler writes. Disheartened, Kesler's parents sent her to Lodz to study medicine and to retrieve them when she could.

Kesler attended the university there, continuing her study of medicine, and found refuge in the people surrounding her, mostly Jewish. Kesler's faith in the Jewish culture was bolstered through the shared experiences of her peers, who had faced horrific circumstances through wartime and emerged to attend university. Writes Kesler, "What recuperative power, what strength of character, we Jews have!" She also wrote of wanting to revitalize Palestine. However, the Chanowiczs began to turn their attentions to family in Sweden. This set back Kesler, who wanted to finish her degree and begin practicing. Nevertheless, in 1946, the family departed to be met by family in Stockholm.

Sweden came with frustrations for the well-educated Kesler, who did not yet know Swedish. Finally, she found work in a factory where many Polish and Russian immigrants were employed. Working on an assembly line, Kesler found relief being among those who understood her experience -- professionals who had fled the same home as she only to be reduced to blue-collar work in prosperous Sweden, where the cost of living was high and the language foreign.

Kesler bounced from job to job in Sweden as she learned the language and developed a more settled lifestyle. Still, she would not forget her dream of becoming a physician. In 1947, Kesler would leave for America on a student visa sent by her uncle in Virginia, where she was accepted to the Virginia Polytechnical Institute.

Before leaving for America, the gender inequality had been described to the determined young Kesler, but, until arriving, she did not understand the homemaking ideals of American women. Her family had begun to suffocate her dreams with the domesticity they demanded from her. Her uncle pursued marriage prospects for her, while Kesler dreamed of, as she frequently put it, "serving humanity." She was estranged from her relatives because of her experiences in wartime, and the cultural gap between Judaism in her homeland and the U.S. depressed her. At services with her Virginia family, Kesler writes, "In Norfolk, the Jews seemed so passive, so inactive, and they barely participated in their prayers."

It seemed Kesler would find nothing but crumpled hopes and poor grades at VPI, bad with English and discouraged without a pre-med program. She would travel to stay with family in Boston before being deemed a burden and sent to live in Chelsea, where she would work at Beth Israel Hospital and studied at Simmons College. She found a home among foreign students there, which was comprised of everything from Canadians to Greeks. Here, she met a young Polish student, Michael G. Kesler, who had studied at MIT after surviving a story similar to that of Regina, his future wife. "My eyes stung as I held back tears of relief that I may have found someone to like," she recounted, "and maybe to love."

Eventually, Regina received a letter from Harvard, where she was admitted upon making an impression of tenacity and conviction, leading ultimately to her graduation from Harvard in 1952. In the same year, Regina would marry Michael, go on to mother five children, and end her odyssey in Paramus as a pediatrician with her dreams realized.

Grit is a story that attests to the life not only of Regina but of the many survivors she met along the way. The text is personal, and it breathes vividly from the page with authenticity and heart. Regina, like so many others, is not here for us to hear the inflection of her voice, its pitch, her pauses. Despite her absence, we, the living, have an opportunity to listen to her experience and stand in awe of her triumph.