Product Description

The author, who was imprisoned in Auschwitz as a teenager, describes her terrible experiences as one of the camp's few adolescent inmates and the miraculous twists of fates that enabled her to survive.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10920 in Books
• Published on: 1999-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 224 pages

From Publishers Weekly
PW's starred review called this memoir, of a 13-year-old Hungarian Jewish girl's incarceration in Auschwitz, "an exceptional story, exceptionally well told." Ages 12-up.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Gr. 8^-12. In a graphic present-tense narrative, this Holocaust memoir describes what happens to a Jewish girl who is 13 when the Nazis invade Hungary in 1944. She tells of a year of roundups, transports, selections, camps, torture, forced labor, and shootings, then of liberation and the return of a few. For those who have read Leitner's stark The Big Lie (1992), this is a much more detailed account, with the same authority of a personal witness. Horrifying as her experience is, she doesn't dwell on the atrocities. There is hope here. Unlike many adult survivor stories, this does not show the victims losing their humanity. The teenager and her mother help each other survive; they save each other from the gas chambers. Even in the slaughter of the cattle trucks strafed by machine-gun fire, "words of comfort emerge from every corner." The occasional overwriting about "drowning in a morass of pain and helplessness" is unfortunate. The facts need no rhetoric. On every page they express her intimate experience. After the war, the teenager finds her brother, hears how her father died. She wonders whether she dare enjoy the luxury of being a girl, of "having hair." A final brief chronology of the Holocaust adds to the value of this title for curriculum use with older readers. Hazel Rochman

Review
Ages 12 and up will find this an intense autobiographical account of a 13-year-old's sudden introduction to war. When Nazis invaded her Hungarian home, Elli found herself shipped to a concentration camp, where she was selected for work. As one of the few teenage camp inmates, Elli recounts a chilling story of survival. -- Midwest Book Review

Customer Reviews

My son could not put it down.
This was my 8th grade son's summer reading. He could not stop reading it and it caused him to initiate a lot of conversation with us about the holocaust. Since it was from the perspective of a girl his own age, he really identified with it.

Quick, entertaining read
I have just started reading more accounts of World War II and really enjoyed this survivor story. It is a big account in a small package. It is not about the gory details, but more about the emotions behind them. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

awesome!!!!!!
this book was awesome. i read it in a day. very hard to read, but you have to do it. buy!!!!