Yocheved Zilberstein née Szwarcfuter was born in Lodz, Poland in 1927. She was sent to the Lodz ghetto together with her parents, Yeoshua and Chana née Szyslewski and her siblings, Leah and Benik. Not long before the ghetto was sealed, the Szwarcfuter family was deported to Auschwitz. Yocheved was the only one of her family to survive the Holocaust. After the war she returned to her home in Lodz where she found a photograph taken at her grandfather's stone setting in the late 1930s, before the outbreak of the war.