These are two sobering questions suggested by Sivan Adler’s new book, “Who Will Take Care of the Cat?” A SUNY Fredonia student, she didn’t write the book — she merely edited it, from journals kept by her Holocaust-surviving grandmother Irene Adler.

Sivan recently hosted a presentation about the book in Fenton Hall on campus. She read a passage and answered some questions about it.

Her father, Arnold Adler, opened the event by noting 80 years ago that day, “Two American tanks rolled up to the top of a mountain in the beautiful Tyrolean Alps … Much to their surprise, they found a camp of thousands of semi-starving survivors.”

The concentration camp was called Ebensee and one of the survivors was Irene Adler. Arnold later met some of the troops who liberated the camp, to express his gratitude. “Of all the violence they faced, the hardest moment they ever encountered was finding these survivors and the piles of…” He stopped short and gathered himself.

OBSERVER Photo by M.J. Stafford Copies of “Who Will Take Care of the Cat” were available at editor Sivan Adler’s recent presentation about the book at SUNY Fredonia.

“They were afraid of the survivors because they didn’t look human to them,” Arnold said of the U.S. soldiers. “Quickly, they found the humanity in them.”

Irene Adler started the war in Hungary, initially an ally of Nazi Germany. Her father and brother had been in the Hungarian army but were kicked out for being Jewish.

Many of Irene’s family members, including her parents and brother, died in concentration camps. Irene’s husband, Sivan’s grandfather, survived the camps. Sivan read a couple poems that Irene dedicated to each of her parents.

The title “Who Will Take Care of the Cat?” references what Irene’s mother said when soldiers arrived to take her to a concentration camp. “That struck me as a very human reaction. I can’t even imagine,” Sivan said.

Sivan made the compilation of Irene’s journals and poems as a “Mystery Maccabee” gift, her Jewish family’s holiday season version of “Secret Santa.”

“It was never in my head that it would get published. It was just a Hanukkah gift,” she said. “Then people started showing interest in it.”

She wound up personally printing the book through Barnes and Noble, where it’s available for sale.

Irene’s writing was lightly edited — “it didn’t seem fair to be edited,” Sivan said. “It is her own personal writing we are lucky to read in a published format.”

There was one incident that stood out. A family member tried to get air by opening a window in the cattle car where they were getting deported to a camp. A soldier shot her dead.

“I was rereading this and I was still shocked that it happened,” Sivan said. “It sounds like something out of an action movie, but it’s not. That’s terrifying.”

The story ended happier for her great-grandmother’s cat. “The cat did survive. Someone in the village looked after it,” Sivan said. It was an emotional moment for her grandparents when they returned and the feline was still there.

“There are so many parts of the book where grandma and grandpa could have given up, but didn’t,” Sivan said.

She said the journals were not written at the time of the events. Irene wrote them “probably in the early 1990s.”

As the presentation closed, an Israeli exchange student suggested to Sivan that she donate a copy of the book to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center.