Holocaust Survivor to Speak: How Old is Old Enough to Hear?

An organization I'm involved with is sponsoring a talk by author and Holocaust survivor Mira Kimmemburg. She wrote "Echos of the Holocaust," a very moving collection of essays on her childhood and young adult years in World War II Poland. She was so young that when the Nazis gave her the gold star, she thought it was something to be brought of, a symbol of her heritage. She would be a teen before she realized she was being marked for death.

The lady is a wonderful storyteller even at age 91. I have heard her speak before and I cried. She lost her entire family in the gas chambers at Tribecca. The only reason she was saved was because someone thought she might be right for Mengele's horrible experiments. Fortunately, the angel of death never picked her from a line-up. While she faced death every day, she never gave up.

So, here's the question: how old do you think is old enough to hear this talk. My youngest nieces are 5 and 7 so they're out of the question. I would like for my older niece to hear it. She's 12 or 13 and she's read The Diary of Anne Frank. She watches R rated movies without batting an eye, but becomes very upset when we pass a dead animal on the side of the world. I would like for her to hear this story as I feel it's very important. I also realize that this may be the last opportunity she has to hear first-hand about the horrors of the holocaust.

Do you think she's too young? My MIL, her guardian, has given me the okay. It's up to me. She wants to come and seems to understand what the discussion will be about. (Of course, I'll be picking her up from school early, so it may just be that she wants to get out of school, but I doubt it.)

I know we have a lot of moms, grandmothers and aunts on here. What do you think?