Sara was born in 1928 in Velikiye Komyaty in the Czech Republic. When she was a child, the region was annexed to Hungary and today it is a part of Ukraine. Sara is the eldest daughter of six children in the Hershkovits family. After the German military invaded her village in March 1944, when she was almost 16, Sara was taken with her parents and five brothers to the Munkács ghetto, and several weeks later they were taken by train to Auschwitz Extermination Camp. Sara's mother and five brothers were taken directly to the gas chambers. Separated from her family, Sara was sent to work in the camp. The number A-7807 was stamped on her arm. Her father was taken to work as a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and she met him several times, beyond four barbed wire fences. A few months later, her father was executed along with 300 Sonderkommando men.

Sara stayed in Auschwitz for nine months, until the day of its liberation, when she weighed a mere 28 kg. She was the only one of her family to survive the camp. She immigrated to Israel in 1947 with her husband and their two-year-old daughter Dalia, and later they had two more daughters – Dorit and Eti. Sara's life mission is to tell the story of what happened to her in Auschwitz. Over the years, she has become a "woman of testimony" and has given many lectures about her Holocaust story, always repeating the words, "I survived to tell."