Elli is thirteen when she is taken; by the time she emerges, she is fourteen and visibly aged beyond recognition.

Livia E. Bitton Jackson’s Elli: Coming of Age in the Holocaust is a first-person account of childhood under Nazi persecution, following Elli Friedmann from her home at the foot of the Carpathians through ghettoisation, deportation, Auschwitz, and Dachau. 

What makes the book land is its plainness, it stays unbearably close to the granular terror of rumours, hunger, cattle cars, family bonds, absurd acts of care, and the child-like effort to keep imagining a future while history closes its fist. A widely read Holocaust memoir, especially suited to younger adult and adult readers interested in survivor testimony, Jewish history, war, memory, and the literature of endurance.

HarperCollins paperback, 1994 reprint. First published in the U.S. in 1980; this paperback edition published by Grafton/HarperCollins. Some cover wear, light creasing and edge rubbing, with age-toning to pages. Internally clean and readable. Good reading copy.