


In Auschwitz, however, the mother was paralyzed when a bunk collapsed on her. But seven weeks later they were returned to Auschwitz, where they met Bubi, who had fared well as an interpreter for the Germans. Separated from both Bubi and her aunt, Elli and her mother, because of their goldene Haar, were sent not to the gas chambers but to labor in Auschwitz and then to Plaszow to shovel dirt and move stones. Elli, her brother, mother, and Aunt Szeren were then sent on a hellish three-day train ride to Auschwitz. As the second ghetto at Dunaszerdahely was liquidated, the able men, including her father, were summoned for transport to labor camps. In the spring of 1944 the 13-year-old budding poet, her mother and father, and her 16-year-old brother, Bubi, suffered the Nazi invasion and were deported to several ghettos, first to Nagymagyar. She describes her journey from the bucolic village to the horrors of the concentration camps. Friedman in Somorja at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains in what had been Czechoslovakia but was at the time occupied by Hungarian forces. Elli: Coming of Age in the Holocaust is the graphic memoir of Livia E.
