The road to writing her memoirs was quite long. In 1991, after a ceremony at Yad Vashem to dedicate a memorial to Estusia, Regina, Ala and Roza, Anna told her son-in-law, Sheldon Schwartz, that she had kept a Polish diary in Auschwitz. It was confiscated and destroyed during a search at some point; and she recreated the entire diary from memory in a displaced persons camp in 1945. Sheldon persuaded Anna to translate the diary into English and the two of them worked together for 10 years; she wrote and he edited. Her memoir, Never Far Away: The Auschwitz Chronicles of Anna Heilman, was published in 2001. The book won the 2002 City of Ottawa Book Award.