Only her closest friends knew of her unsettled childhood - her maternal grandfather's death in a German concentration camp, her Jewish mother's escape from Germany in 1933, her largely absent father, mother and daughter's wanderings through France avoiding capture by the Nazis, their time in Spain and Mexico, and their eventual emigration to New Zealand in the late 1940s.
"The girls in my class at Christchurch Girls' High School had absolutely no idea about all of that. To them, I was just a strange girl who had arrived from Mexico."
In 1953, aged 16, Miriam Frank moved to Dunedin to study medicine. She says she did not talk to her fellow students about her childhood either, preferring to put the past behind her.
But now she has bared her eventful life for all to read in her memoir, My Innocent Absence, Tales from a Nomadic Life, released in England last month.
Visiting friends in Dunedin this week, she said the book, written on and off over 20 years, tracked two generations of her family.
Born in Spain in 1936 to her German mother and a Lithuanian father, Miriam moved to France as a baby. At age 4, she and her mother were stateless refugees living in a dormitory in Casablanca, Morocco, waiting for a ship to take them away from the troubles of Europe to the safety of Spain.
At the age of 6, by now living in Mexico, she remembers being taught how to fry an egg to feed herself after school while her mother worked. At 12, she was uprooted again, this time to Christchurch where one of her mother's sisters had settled.
But Dr Frank says it was not until she was an adult that she began to understood why she and her mother lived "out of one small suitcase" for so many years and learnt about the Holocaust.
Dr Frank completed her medical training in Auckland. She worked in hospitals in Israel in the late 1950s after the Suez war, was an anaesthetist and consultant in London for more than 30 years, married (and later separated from) the German artist Rudolf Kortokraks, established a successful art school with him in Italy, raised two daughters, and spent many years translating Argentinian poetry.
• Dr Frank will read excerpts from her autobiography tonight at the Hunter Centre, Great King St, at 6pm.
