Elly: True Story of the Holocaust

Title: Elly: True Story of the Holocaust
Author: Elly Berkovits Gross
Genre: Historical, auto-biography, non-fiction
Reviewed by: Carly

Elly Berkovits was a blue-eyed, blonde-haired Jewish girl who was born in Simimleul-Silvaniei, Romania. She was born on February 14, 1929. Then, her parents decided to have another child, and on March 16, 1939, when Elly was ten, they had a handsom little boy named Adalbert. Elly loved Adalbert so much because he was her only brother. It was in the spring of 1939, the the Nazis invaded their surrounding areas. A year later, on September 10, 1940, three regions of Romania were taken-over by Hungary. When this happened, Hungary and Germany came to Elly’s hometown and started drafting men from 18-55 years old. Her father was 36 at the time, and was taken into forced labor, they didn’t know at the time, but he was to never be heard from again.

Beginning in the winter of 1944, all Jews had to wear a yellow star of David on them, and people were told to spit on them and chant, “ Dirty Jew, Did a star fall on you?” After Passover, a group of men armed with rifles barged into their home and orderd Elly and her family to leave. They were forced to move to a former brick factory, referrered to as the Ghetto, in Chehul-Silvaniei. There, Elly, 15 at the time, was one of the four lucky woman to be a potato peeler, every night she got to bring back a potato to her mom and Adalbert. In May of 1944, there was a mandatory strip search and the Jews were loaded into cattle cars, about 95-100 per car. They were given two buckets, one for waste and one containing water. Finally, the doors were opened on June 2, that was when the army soldiers threw out the mother and newborn, the ill, the dead, and the elderly. The air had a haunting smell of burnt rubber and the sound of a symphony. Then, there was a man wearing white gloves waiting outside of the car. He was appointing groups of people, left and right. Elly was to the right and mother and Adalbert to the left, she waved to her family, and ran to her group. That was the last time Elly and her family were ever going to see each other, but at the time no one knew that.

The two groups were escorted their own ways. The right side was taken to a builing where they were striped of clothing and belongings, the also had to shave their heads, this was to register into the camp. The next room, was a shower house. When they entered all they got was a tiny bar of white soap that said,”Jude Siefe”, meaning Jewish Soap. Then, they were taken to the cabins at Auschwitz-2/Birkenau. Each cabin housed a minimum of 1,000 Jews. After that,the woman were put to work. Elly’s job was to scrub chimneys with broken bricks and a white chlorox jel that had to be applied with your fingers. Her other job was to give the captors coffee in the morning. In the August of 1944, Dr. Mengele sorted the woman again. Elly survived because he thought she was pregnant, but actually, she got thicker from eating sandy potato peels from the garbage. Then, they were shipped away to Fallerslaben, Germany. The soldiers demanded that Elly washed the living quarters because the fumes made her sick. Usually, the Jews that got sick were taken away forever, but her life was spared. In April of ’45, the group was shipped to Zalsweden, where she was reunited with some of her cousins. Finally, in April 14, 1945, allies came and sent the survivors back to their homelands. When Elly went back to her childhood home in Romania, after this event, her family wasn’t there. Her house had been ransacked, and the residents gave Elly a letter that came for her mom. It said that her father was burned alive in a trailor at Dorsensk, Russia, in the Spring of ’43. Also, she found out that her mom and Adalbert were sent to the gas chambers when they were seperated.