Elli Friedmann was born on February 28, 1931, in a small town called Samorín, tucked between the Carpathian hills and the Danube.
Her childhood was ordinary. She dreamed of being a poet, went to school, and had a 16-year-old brother named Bubi who teased her the way older brothers do.
Then in March 1944, Nazi forces occupied the region. Elli was 13.
Within weeks, her school closed. Her family lost their home and was pushed into a crowded ghetto in Nagymagyar, then another in Dunaszerdahely. Space, food, and privacy all disappeared at once.
Her father was pulled away first, sent to a labor camp. Would she ever see him again?
Elli, her mother, her brother, and her aunt Serena were loaded onto a train. The journey to Poland lasted three days, packed into a cattle car with no room to sit.
On May 31, 1944, the doors opened onto Auschwitz. Guards shouted. Dogs barked. Families were split apart in seconds.
Elli's brother was pulled into one line. Her aunt Serena said goodbye, certain it was final. Elli and her mother were pushed toward a man later known to history as Dr. Josef Mengele.
He looked at Elli for only a moment. Her height and her long, fair hair made her look older than 13 — old enough, in his eyes, for labor instead of the gas chamber.
That single glance decided everything. One line meant death within the hour. The other meant a chance, however brutal, to keep breathing.
Elli and her mother were sent to the labor side. Within hours, her hair was shaved off and a number was tattooed onto her arm. The girl who once daydreamed about poetry now had an identity made of ink.
From Auschwitz, she and her mother were moved to Plaszow, where they were forced into backbreaking work — shoveling dirt and moving stone, day after day, with guards watching for any pause.
Later they were transferred again, this time to a camp near Augsburg. Conditions were still harsh, but something remarkable happened there. Elli and her mother saved potato peels to burn as makeshift Sabbath candles.
They fasted quietly on Yom Kippur. They fashioned Chanukah lights out of stolen oil and threadbare wicks. During Passover, they refused bread, even on starvation rations. Small defiances, kept secret, kept alive.
In 1945, American forces reached the camps and liberation came. Elli was 14 years old. Her mother had survived beside her the entire time.
Years later, she put the weight of it into a single sentence that still stops readers cold: "I am fourteen, and I have lived a thousand years."
Elli, later known as Livia Bitton-Jackson, eventually crossed the Atlantic on a refugee boat in 1951. She built a new life in the United States.
She earned a PhD in Hebrew culture and Jewish history from New York University, then taught history at the City University of New York for 37 years.
Her first memoir, published in 1980, won the Christopher Award, the Eleanor Roosevelt Humanitarian Award, and the Jewish Heritage Award. In 1997, she rewrote her story for a younger generation.
She eventually settled in Israel with her husband, children, and grandchildren. She died on May 17, 2023, at the age of 92.
A doctor's half-second judgment on a train platform in 1944 decided her whole future. She spent the next 79 years making sure that moment was never forgotten.
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