Through all the horrors, the growing relationship between Elli and her mother is beautiful. Elli didn’t feel loved enough by her mother before, but through their experience together a fierce bond was formed between them and they both developed a greater love and respect for one another.
They are thrown into a life of starvation and dehydration, exhaustion, brutality, the smell of burning corpses, and constant fear of death. Living in the camps becomes a daily struggle to survive and not succumb to hopelessness. With their luggage, clothes, hair, and names goes their individuality. They are stripped of their clothes and given the same grey garb and a string of numbers tattooed onto their skin replaces their names.
Mengele spared Elli, telling her to lie about her age, because he noticed her thick blonde hair and blue eyes- the traits of the “pure race.” He sent Elli and her mother to the right, and her aunt to the left.Īt Auschwitz, their heads are shaved. Mengele was an SS captain and physician infamous for his inhumane testing on concentration camp inmates, and assessed who of those entering the camp were fit to work (would be marched to the right to the camp) and who were not (would be marched to the left to the gas chambers) The sick, the elderly, and children younger than 16 were sent to the left. The rest were taken to Auschwitz, and Bubi was then separated from the women to the male camp. Soon after arriving, all able-bodied men were abruptly taken to labor camps, including her father. Elli notes how she never gave her own religion and heritage much thought before the invasion, but then it became her identity. The Jews were forced to not interact with the rest of society or be present in public places, to be registered as Jews and to wear identifying gold stars, to give up their possessions, and ultimately leave their homes in Samorin for the Ghettos. Nazi’s invaded Hungary in 1944 and began the segregation of Jewish people from non-Jewish people immediately.
And she gives us a warning for the future.Įlli lived in Samorin, Czechoslovakia, with her mother, Laura Friedmann, her father, Markus Friedman, and her older brother, Bubi. She tells of the lowest moments of humanity, but also how humanity can prevail through evil, and that love grows stronger in even the darkest times. Friedman.) In her book, she captures the raw horror of the Holocaust from the perspective of a 13-year old Jewish girl who lived through it from its beginning to its end. I Have Lived a Thousand Years is a memoir by Holocaust survivor Livia Bitton-Jackson (born as Elli L. Genre: memoir, nonfiction, history, WWII, holocaust.
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