Elli: Coming of Age in the Holocaust

Reviewed by Hannah Heard
Ararat Community College
Australia

This book, written by Livia Bitten Jackson is essentially a work showing the depths to which human emotions can develop when all human resemblance has been taken away. There was a great contrast between the Elli we saw at the beginning of the ordeal and the Elli after liberation.

At the start of World War II, Elli was a naive, self-conscious, selfish, typical fourteen-year-old girl who knew she was a Jew, but as quoted in the book, she never really thought about what it was to be a Jew. Then we see her at the end of the book, tempered, wizened and mature beyond her years. She was tempered because of the repeated torture of the concentration camps, relying only on her personal resources. Elli always had her courage even when she was a naive young girl Her stubbornness was a survival factor, a personal resource. Each setback made her stronger.

When her mother was in the infirmary in Auschwitz, she went in and took her mother out because people who spent too long in there were sent to the gas. She went into the gas chamber with courage because she refused to let her mother die or let herself slide into despair and die.

Read the book to see what happened at that point in Elli's story. With each new stumbling block Elli became stronger and more set in her resolve. To her, dying was as bad as giving up. The way she could fight was to live, to hold on to her faith, using the fact that she was alive as a weapon.

But then we see her at the end of the book; she didn't hate the Germans. She had gone through too much for that. An ironic thing is that it was a German who saved her life. If she hadn't had such desired looks, blonde hair and blue eyes, she would have been sent to the gas chambers the first day she arrived at Auschwitz except that the German soldier swapped her to the other line. Even though food was scarce and the prisoners were wasting away, Elli still fasted according to her religion. It kept her faith strong.

This book's story shows the extremes to which human nature can rise to and stoop to. Elli acquired her dignity throughout her ordeal as she recounts her Holocaust experiences in the book. At liberation, people mistook her age for 60 years because of all that she had been through.