Elly Gross

Elly Berkovits Gross was born in 1929 in Simleu Silvaniei, a small town in Northern Transylvania, a mountainous part of northwest Romania taken over by Hungary in 1940. Gross begins her Holocaust memoir for older children with a few impressionistic scenes from childhood. Surprisingly, she recounts no stories related to her Jewish heritage—its customs, traditions, or place in her daily life. It is unclear but possible that her family was secular and assimilated into the community. She lived just a little ways down the street from a Catholic church, played with the neighbourhood children, and attended the same village school they did.

A few of Gross’s stories from early childhood concern the geography and climate of the region. There were memorable hailstorms and in springtime snow melt from the mountains could send streams, even floods, through the streets. There are a couple of anecdotes about her father, who insisted on accompanying her to school one slippery day and ended up falling, and, who, on another occasion, brought her the only doll she’d ever receive. Sadly, a jealous friend smashed its pretty porcelain face. She recalls attending a family wedding, where she was given a gold ring and a mother-of-pearl-handled knife. The knife would later be used to carve out a breathing hole in the wooden cattle car that transported her mother, her younger brother Adalbert, and hundreds of other Jewish women and children from the Cehei ghetto, an old brick factory just outside her town, to Auschwitz II-Birkenau in Poland.

When Romania was forced to cede Northern Transylvania to Hungary, writes Gross, significant discriminatory measures against Jews were instituted. Jewish belongings and property were seized and given to loyal Hungarians. Once peaceful relationships between Jews and their neighbours became toxic. A former young friend became a street agitator, throwing stones and hurling insults at elderly Jews. He even spat at her. Travel and schooling restrictions as well as curfews were put in place. Gross acknowledges her blond hair and blue eyes granted her freedoms other Jews did not have. As a young teen, she was able to travel by train once a week to another town to get food from her aunt without being stopped and questioned.

In June 1942 when she was 13, Elly’s father was drafted into a forced labour camp. She would never see him again. In 1944, when the German occupation of Hungary began, Jews were forced to wear the yellow Star of David on their clothing. Soon after, Elly, now 15, her mother and her five-year-old brother were forced out of their home and into the Klein brickworks ghetto and ultimately transported to Auschwitz.

When their train arrived at the concentration camp, two men in striped tatters rushed aboard Elly’s car. They told the girl to say she was 18 and advised her mother to hand off her young son to someone else. Neither mother nor daughter had any real sense of the place they’d come to. The scene was chaotic: barking dogs, shouting soldiers, and children crying—all while a rag-clad group of musicians performed classical music in the background. Elly was directed to the right, one of the one to two percent of her transport granted “temporary survival”; her mother and brother were sent to the left. Strangely or perhaps not, even after many months of distress, fear, starvation, and crowding in the appalling barracks (with their three-tiered bunks, 14 women crammed on each level), the girl still did not grasp what this place was intended for. She frequently thought of returning home to tell her parents about the deplorable treatment she’d endured. As for the four chimneys, constantly belching out smoke and ash: she thought they were associated with a tire factory, not parts of crematoria. A thinly veiled remark by another inmate about the sudden disappearance of the ghostly, skeletal Jews from Terezin in Czechoslovakia—“They’ve gone to a warmer climate”—was still too opaque for Elly.

Gross focuses on the chain of lucky events that allowed her to survive. An overseer had her moved from one barrack to another nearby so that she could be with her two cousins. This same woman saw Elly faint during one of the interminable morning roll calls and had her rushed indoors to scrub the barrack’s floors, saving her from being one of the 100-150 women designated by the SS for that day’s extermination. Miraculously, Gross also evaded selection by Dr. Josef Mengele, who observing her stomach which was distended from her recent gorging on potato peels, asked her if she was pregnant. She was directed towards the group sent to the Volkswagen factory in Fallersleben, Germany, which had been repurposed to make rockets. Conditions there were considerably better.

The last third of Gross’s memoir skims quickly over her life after the war ended. Details are light. At age 16, she returned to Northern Transylvania to find her home taken over by strangers. A year later, she married a man eight years her senior, had a son and then a daughter. Ultimately the family immigrated to the United States. Gross and her husband worked two and three unskilled jobs at a time to make ends meet. They also attended classes to learn English. Always determined to better herself, Elly attended college classes, finally earning her diploma at age 69.

Gross’s memoir is bookended by short notes from Gross’s daughter and son. It also includes a few family and historical photographs and some of Elly’s poems, which are heartfelt though not accomplished. Gross’s writing is serviceable enough and the material is appropriate for a young audience, sparing older children harrowing details. I think it’s most unfortunate that Gross did not work with a professional writer. Though roughly chronological, the organization of the material could be better; there is a great deal of repetition, important background information is sometimes lacking, and some opinions are unsubstantiated. For those reasons, this is not the first Holocaust memoir I’d recommend to older children and young teens.… (mais)

Elly: My True Story of the Holocast is by Elly Berkovits G., and is written has a autobiography of short stories. Elly was fifteen when she, her mother and little brother were taken for the camps. A year before Elly's father had already been taken. At the camp Elly was seperated from her mother and brother, sadly that would be the last time she ever saw the last of her family again. In the book she explains her hard labor at working in the factories, meeting sweet and bitter people, and miracle incidents that saved her life. Elly also talks about how when th ewar ended she had no home, family, or money, but as she tired harder and harder she finally started to find jobs. Eventially she got married and had two children, and is now doing whatever she can to rewrite her past and spread the message of the holocast.
I enjoyed this book there were many scary parts when Elly went into detail. Most of all it was experiencal and many new things lernt from this book.… (mais)