More than 40 years after watching her father die in a German concentration camp, Suzanne Mehler Whiteley woke up in her Evanston apartment knowing she had to tell her story.

“In that haze, in that moment when you’re first waking up and you’re not really awake yet, I heard my voice say, ‘You’ve got to do this and you’ve got to do this now and you can’t wait,'” she said.

The next week, Whiteley took a leave of absence from her job as a therapist. A decade later, her story — the story of a young girl caught in the middle of one of history’s great tragedies — had been transformed from a series of memories into a 168-page book, “Appel is Forever: A Child’s Memoir,” published in 1999.

Whiteley was only 4 years old when the Nazis marched into her native Netherlands. She was only 7 when she was taken from her home and sent first to Westerbork, a “transit camp” in the Netherlands, and then to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany.

All of her memories of life in the camps were those of a young child. But by the time she finally got around to writing her book, Whiteley was in her mid-50s. Faced with the dilemma of deciding what perspective to use in her writing, she sided with her inner child.

“I found it incredibly important to me to give voice to the child in the sense of speaking for all the children,” she said.

Whiteley saw her book as a chance to validate children’s feelings as real and important.

“We don’t take children’s inner world as seriously as we take the adult inner world,” she said. “That’s changing, but it’s not adequate because we allow things to happen to children that are so outrageous.”

Like all those at Bergen-Belsen, Whiteley had to stand outside to be counted each morning in a process known as “appel,” which became the inspiration for her book’s title. The rigid routine — and the horrors she witnessed — make the older Whiteley marvel at how the younger Whiteley survived.

“The older I get, the more it seems like a miracle I was alive at the end,” she said.

Just two weeks before Bergen-Belsen was liberated, the Nazis put prisoners on a train. The night before she boarded the train, Whiteley was left to take care of her ailing father while her mother cared for another family member. Before morning, her father was gone.

“He just died in the night,” she said. “And I stayed with him.”