Elly

September 1, 2009
Gr 5-8-Tagged as a memoir, Gross's short chapters describe her experiences in Auschwitz and as a slave laborer as well as her postwar life. They read more like essays and are not always chronological. A selection of poetry is appended, and an essay, "Those with Sore Throats Disappeared," is randomly placed in the middle of that section. While the book includes powerful, poignant, and moving excerpts that might be useful to Holocaust educators, the total package will have difficulty finding an audience, especially with the abundance of compelling personal narratives, memoirs, and fiction already available, such as Livia Bitton-Jackson's "I Have Lived a Thousand Years" (S & S, 1997), Anita Lobel's "No Pretty Pictures" (HarperCollins, 1998), and Jennifer Roy's "Yellow Star" (Marshall Cavendish, 2006)."Rachel Kamin, North Suburban Synagogue Beth El, Highland Park, IL"

Copyright 2009 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2009
Grades 4-7 When she was 15, Elly, along with her mother and younger brother, was taken from her home in Romania and sent by cattle car to the Auschwitz-II/Birkenau concentration camp. There the family was brutally separated and Elly never saw her mother or brother again. Later, Elly reports in this unsparing Holocaust memoir, she was taken from the camp and made to work as a slave laborer in a German factory, an experience that would become testimony in a successful postwar lawsuit against Volkswagen. Her recollections, told in short chapters that are seldom more than two pages in length, are intrinsically powerful but contain a good deal of repetition and often lack detail or the context necessary for complete understanding. However, as a powerful reminder of mans capacity for inhumanity, this memoir is essential reading.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)