Holocaust survivor Daisy Miller spoke Monday night about the years of her childhood spent in hiding and lauded the unsung heroes who helped save her life and the lives of many other Jews.

“The only reason I am here,” Miller told the almost 300 people gathered in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union, “is not because I am an expert … but because I happened to be born in 1938 in Yugoslavia as a Jewish child.”

Miller said after her birth, her family spent three years attempting to escape from Yugoslavia to Italy.

In 1941, using false documents obtained through “connections and bribing,” the family Miller described as an “average, middle-class” family finally crossed the Italian border.

In Italy, they lived in relative safety, Miller said, although she remembered they always carried with them the knowledge that they were “being watched.”

However, Miller said, when Italy and Germany broke their alliance and the Germans invaded, all feelings of safety evaporated.

“The only reason we were being hunted and persecuted was because we happened to be Jewish,” she said. “Jews were to be exterminated, wiped off the face of the Earth.”

Miller attributed the family’s survival to the benevolence and courage of Italian farmers who were willing to offer Jews hiding places in their homes.

“You have to understand, by doing that, these people were taking tremendous risks,” she said. “If discovered, they would have been stood up against their houses and shot.”

Miller said the heroism of these farmers is an “aspect of the Holocaust that also needs to be documented.”

“There were times when people actually helped save [lives],” she said. “They did not go along with the masses. Miraculous. I am grateful to these people forever and ever.”

The sacrifice these people made is one that Miller deliberates over in her daily life.

“I’ve had to ask myself many a time if someone were to come to me in the middle of the night and say, ‘We need a safe house for these people who are being hunted. … Will you give us shelter for them?’ would I risk my life, my entire family’s life to save a stranger’s?

“I’ve had to ask myself that question. It’s a very tough one. But these simple Italian farmers did,” she said.

Miller said she has gone back to visit the families who sheltered her during the war.

“When I visit them, I always ask them, ‘Why did you do that?'” she said. “The response has always been: ‘What else could we do?’ Incredible.”

One especially haunting memory Miller related was when German soldiers were going house to house looking for men to perform labor.

“A German soldier burst into the room with a huge gun pointing at us,” she said. “It looked like a cannon to me.”

She said her father and the farmer had fled into the woods. The farmer’s wife told the soldier the men already had been taken and that the women were relatives who had traveled from the south to escape the war.

“And he bought that,” she said. “And I have to tell you that I remember exactly this moment — frozen in time, as far as I’m concerned,” she said. “I remember exactly where I stood. I know exactly where my mother and my sister stood. … And that is a scene that I will never, ever forget.”

Although she was a small child while her family was in hiding, Miller said she has many memories that are vivid.

“Living in fear is something that I have imprinted in me, and even though many years have passed since those horrible years … I still wear those scars,” she said.

She added that this uncertainty, insecurity and constant sense of fear and dread are a “terrible legacy” that has been passed on in her children and grandchildren as well.

“We’re talking about the after-effects of the Holocaust being felt for generations to come,” she said.

Miller said the memories are especially difficult to deal with for child survivors.

“All of our life [we] were told, ‘You were only a kid, what do you remember?’ ‘Your memories are not correct…’ ‘Forget about it; keep it in the past,'” she said. “For 50 years almost, we were told to deny this history of ours as children, but we always had it inside.”

In 1982, Miller helped found the Child Survivors of the Holocaust, which now thousands of members worldwide, provide a support system for child survivors.

Miller also spoke about another organization she has been involved with since 1994.

“I am fortunate, though, in that I had the opportunity to do something beyond all this,” she said.

Miller works with the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which was founded by Steven Spielberg after the filming of “Schindler’s List” and is dedicated toward preserving on videotape the testimonials of Holocaust survivors.

“The typical stereotype we have of a Holocaust survivor is someone who was in a camp and has a number on their arm,” she said, “but the Holocaust experiences are very different.”

Miller defined a Holocaust survivor as anyone of Jewish descent who lived in Europe during Nazi occupation and said the definition also includes Gypsies, homosexuals and members of other groups that face persecution.

She said it is the mission of the Shoah Foundation to document all perspectives of the Holocaust.

She said the foundation has interviewed 50,181 survivors in their homes in their own languages about their lives before, during and after the war.

“We are getting eyewitness accounts of people’s experiences, the human experience,” she said. “When you hear about it from people who lived it, it takes on a different form.”

Miller responded to a question from the audience about the situation in Kosovo, saying she personally believes “the bombings are warranted.”

“If we allow this to go unchecked, another Holocaust will occur,” she said.

Although, Miller said she hesitates using the word “Holocaust” to refer to anything other than the events during World War II, she sees a similarity between the situations.

“There are people being persecuted right now simply because of their ethnic background,” Miller said. “Any time that happens, it is an unjustice, and we must fight it.”