LEWISTON – To Judith Isaacson – who experienced some of the same horrors Anne Frank would endure – the intimacy of the young woman’s diary is still moving.

Hiding from the Nazis in a Holland attic, Frank described her feelings with a touching directness in her now-famous diary. And in the days before her capture, she remained hopeful.

“I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart,” she wrote in her diary. She was 16.

“She didn’t know what was to come,” Isaacson said.

On Sept. 3, 1944, Frank arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Isaacson, then Judith Magyar, was moved out of the camp about a week earlier.

“We were not there at the same time,” said Isaacson, who was a 19-year-old girl in the fall of 1944. But she experienced many of the same evils.

“Each moment was like a year,” Isaacson said.

Isaacson described her experiences in her book, “Seed of Sarah: Memoirs of a Survivor.” In collaboration with the Anne Frank exhibit, she plans to read the chapter from her memoir that relates to her arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

“I was older than she was,” said Isaacson, who is from Hungary. “But there were similarities.”

Both teenagers were separated from family upon their arrival. Frank and her mother were murdered months later at another camp. Isaacson and her mother, Rose Magyar, survived.

After three months at the concentration camp, they were assigned to the Dynamit-Nobel munitions factory as slave labor.

They were liberated in April 1945. A month later, Judith met a young soldier and lawyer from Lewiston, Irving Isaacson. The couple is still together.

Rose Magyar died in 1999, at the age of 97, one of the world’s oldest survivors of the Nazi concentration camps.

Next Monday’s reading at the Franco-American Heritage Center is about bearing witness, Judith Isaacson said.

After so many people have told their stories, there are still misguided people who say it never happened, she said. People should read the survivor accounts such as Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” she said.

“I do hope that people are aware,” Isaacson said.