Elli was 20 years old when she came to New York. She entered college as soon as she arrived, and eventually became a history professor. She has written several books about her experiences during and after the Holocaust. As an adult, she came to divide her time between living in the U.S. and in Israel . Her dual citizenship became a symbol of personal triumph. Finally, she was able to fulfill her dream of living a free life as a proud Jewish woman.

Elli and her mother found Armin and placed a rag on his head to hide him among them as a woman before they were ordered back on the train. Away from the barrage of bullets, they were once again locked behind closed doors, safe for the moment. The next day, however, the train was attacked by the Allies once again. Machine-gun fire penetrated the walls of the train car wounding many of the prisoners, including Armin. As the night fell, the train grew colder and men and women wept and howled with fear and pain.

After three days of traveling, the train doors suddenly opened in the middle of the road and the prisoners fell out in confusion. Many raced into the fields to find food, but soon were caught in the crossfire between the German soldiers and the Allies .

they saw Armin again for the first time, he was a mere skeleton. Desperate to help him, Elli and her mother secretly passed their daily portion of bread over the fence to Armin in the men’s side of the camp.

Elli and her mother discovered a group of people from their hometown in this camp, and learned that Elli’s brother Armin was among them.

Elli and her mother managed to get onto the transport that took the women from Auschwitz to the German city of Augsburg, where they began to work in a factory producing parts for the German air force. At the factory, Elli was assigned to join a select work group of “superior intelligence” because of her “Aryan looks.” Elli’s mother was assigned to a different work group, but they were both allowed to stay in the same sleeping quarters.

the women prisoners were immediately called out for another selection , either to be transported out of Auschwitz , or to be sent to the gas chambers .

After seven and a half weeks in Plaszow, Elli and her mother were put on another train together. Elli tried not to think about anything but staying close to her mother on yet another one of their terrifying journeys to an unknown destination. Three days later, the trains had returned to Auschwitz . At this point, Elli’s mother no longer had the will to go on. She refused to leave the train, preferring to stay with those now unable to even walk.

On their tenth day in Auschwitz , the section where Elli and her mother were standing was suddenly ordered to march. The women were marched out past the barracks , past the barbed-wire fences, past the gates of the camp, and onto the cattle cars once again. After some time, the train rolled to a stop in the Polish city of Krakow, where the women were forced onto open army trucks. Driving onward, they soon entered under wide metal gates with a sign declaring their final destination as the labor camp , Plaszow.

Elli and her family arrived in a place in Poland called Auschwitz on May 31, 1944. They emerged from the crowded cattle cars into the chaos of screaming officers and barking dogs. They were told to leave behind the few belongings they had taken with them. Then the women were forced to separate from the men.

One night after about a month in Nagymagyar, every man between the ages of eighteen and forty-five received a summons to report to the entrance of the ghetto in the morning, where soldiers were waiting to take the men to forced labor . Elli’s father packed his knapsack and said his goodbyes.

April 1944, soliders rounded up Elli and all the Jews of her town and sent them to a nearby town called Nagymagyar. They were allowed to bring 50 kilograms (about 110 pounds) of belongings, and no more. The remainder of their belongings had to be left at home, and they were required to hand over the keys to their home to the authorities. Elli and her family loaded a few belongings on a peasant cart and began the journey.

Elli’s brother watched as German troops entered Budapest and began their occupation of Hungary. He immediately bought a train ticket to return home and told his family about the arrival of the tanks and the crowds of locals shouting, “Heil, Hitler!”

. Elli and all Jewish residents were forced to wear a yellow star and paint a yellow star on their home. Elli was devastated. She refused to leave her home for nearly a week because she did not want to be seen in public with the yellow star .

After war broke out in Europe in September of 1939, the Hungarian army began raiding Jewish homes in the middle of the night. They would say they were looking for weapons, but actually used the opportunity to take at will many valuables from Jewish homes. Elli watched the raids in humiliation, as the soldiers ordered around her father like a criminal. Sometimes they would accuse Elli’s father of crimes, arrest him, beat him up, and return him sore and abused after several days, unable to walk. Elli and her family lived in fear.

the Hungarians closed the Friedmann’s store. Then, they began imposing special restrictions on Jews. There were laws that prevented Jews from keeping kosher, reading newspapers, and even listening to the radio.

Elli was born on February 28, 1931 and grew up in Samorin, Czechoslovakia, a small town near Bratislava. She lived there with her parents and her brother, Armin. Other relatives lived nearby, some on the other side of the border, in Hungary.

When she returned to Israel , Aza became a teacher. During her studies, she wrote an important paper about the educator who inspired her as a young girl, Dr. Janusz Korczak . She learned about and was inspired by a simple letter that Dr. Korczak wrote to Ein Harod shortly before the war broke out in Europe.

In February 1943, Aza and her friends on the kibbutz got their first glimpse of the real devastation of the war. A group of children had arrived at the kibbutz from Europe. They had escaped through the Soviet Union, and then through Tehran, in Iran. Many of the children had experienced terrible suffering in the ghettos and camps, had lost their families, and now found themselves many miles away from their homes, in a strange land. Aza and the other children on the kibbutz tried to be kind, but it was difficult to understand all that these immigrant children had endured. The children did not speak much about their experiences.

While Aza and the other children were too young to go to war, they also participated in the war effort. She and the other children conducted fundraisers to send food or money to the children in Europe.

On September 1, 1939 Nazi Germany invaded Poland and World War II began. Some of the facts about the progress of the war were known to Aza and her friends. They learned that the Nazis enacted new laws against the Polish Jews, forcing them to wear armbands with the Star of David for identification, dismissing Jewish children from public schools, and relocating entire communities into ghettos .

In 1933, the Nazi party gained power in Germany after electoral success. antisemitism was not only increasing in that country, but even became a part of many official government policies.

Aza was born in July 1928 in the Mandate for Palestine