I Have Lived a Thousand Years

This is the story of Elli, thirteen at the time that she and her family are deported to a concentration camp. She and her mother are moved from camp to camp, and at one point her long blond hair saves her. A man who she later learns was the notorious Dr. Mengele touches her braids and tells her that she is sixteen from now on. He sends her and her mother to a work camp. Much later, Ellie finds out that the group that she should have been in (under age 16 with their parents) was sent directly to the gas chambers. Although Elli was in captivity only a little over a year, she feels, in her words, like she has "lived a thousand years." Her year of captivity is heart-wrenching; separation, reuniting, and separation again of family members, starvation and sickness, constant moving from one camp to the next, continual living in death and destruction-all take their toll on Elli. After her release, one towns person guesses that fourteen-year-old Elli is about sixty. But as Elli says in the introduction to her book, she realizes that she much write down her experiences because the generations that remember the Holocaust are dying out rapidly and that it should never be forgotten in the annals of history. Instead the people who lived it must continue to tell their stories. Elli's story was as riveting as it was disturbing. This is a good book for anyone who wants to learn an inside view of the Holocaust.