An open letter to the thieves who used AI to copy my book

Dear ‘Jude',

The last place Renee Salt saw her father alive was on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.‘An army of heavily armed Gestapo and SS men with lunging, barking German Shepherd dogs were waiting on the platform shouting orders. It's impossible to describe the chaos,' Renee told me about her dawn arrival at the largest of the Third Reich's extermination camps. ‘They shouted: "Raus! (Be quick.) Leave the luggage." My father jumped off first and I jumped after him. But by then he had disappeared into thin air, without a kiss or a goodbye

‘I never saw my father again. I believed he had died in the gas chambers. A terrible sickly-sweet foul smell filled the air and a thick noxious smoke hung over everything.'

This was almost one of the first things the frail 95-year-old told me when I visited her in her sheltered housing apartment in London. Then she broke down, her hands shaking, her eyes growing wide with fear and I realised, "she isn't remembering this. She is reliving it!".

This was the beginning of an intense twelve-month process to research, write and give a platform for an elderly Holocaust survivor to bear witness. She was the survivor. I was the writer, tasked with bringing her story to the page before it was too late.