
In 1944, when the Germans occupy Hungary, life for thirteen-year-old Elli Friedmann (the author's birth name) begins a descent into the worst nightmares of the Holocaust.

The teen matures from a naive child concerned with boys and bicycles to a toughened, traumatized-yet still hopeful-young woman. During the following year, Elli and her mother survive terrible suffering and injustice through sheer courage, perseverance, and ingenuity. Her blonde braids and tall stature save her from instant death in the crematorium. In 1944, Elli Friedmann, a 13-year-old Hungarian Jew, is deported with her family to Auschwitz. She recounts what it was like to exist there as one of the few teenage inmates and the tiny but miraculous twists of fate that helped her survive against the odds. But worse was to come in Auschwitz concentration camp. She tells what it was like to be suddenly forbidden to attend school, talk to neighbors, to forcibly leave home and move to a ghetto, lose all privacy and almost starve. It describes, in intimate and excruciating detail, how her world was shattered by their arrival.

This is the memoir of Elli Friedmann who was thirteen years old in March 1944 when the Nazis invaded Hungary.
